Future and Cosmos: conformity

Showing posts with label conformity. Show all posts

Saturday, July 23, 2022

"The Scientist" Magazine Poorly Advised the Public in the Early Months of COVID-19

In the post here and the post here I documented how leading health agencies such as the WHO, the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases made crucial blunders during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar blunders were committed by the mainstream science press. In the post here I documented how the leading online science publication Quanta Magazine failed to properly alert the public on how to protect itself during the crucial early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this post I will discuss how another leading online science publication (The Scientist at www.the-scientist.com) failed to properly advise the public in the crucial early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

People in the USA only began to hear about coronavirus (also called COVID-19) early in the year 2020. The first few months of the year 2020 were a critical period during which the "evil genie" of COVID-19 might have been pretty much kept in its bottle if the public had been well-advised, and the right steps had been taken. Thanks to the excellent tagging system at The Scientist site, it is possible to see exactly how The Scientist covered COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic. You can use links like this to find all the articles the magazine published on COVID-19.

https://www.the-scientist.com/tag/coronavirus

https://www.the-scientist.com/tag/COVID-19

Then you just use the pagination links at the bottom right to navigate back to the stories that appeared on COVID-19 in the first half of 2020. The two links above give almost identical results after about February 1, 2020, when almost all stories on COVID-19 in The Scientist had tags of both "coronavirus" and "COVID-19."

The January 2020 stories COVID-19 stories in The Scientist are below:

None of these stories did much of anything to alert the US public to the danger that COVID-19 would spread massively in the United States. Below are the COVID-19 stories that The Scientist had in the first half of February 2020:

None of these stories did much of anything to alert the US public to the growing peril of COVID-19. The first article had a headline giving the inaccurate impression that there were drugs that could cure COVID-19, at a time in which no such drugs existed. The last article was one that attempted to argue that COVID-19 was not all that much to worry about. The February 14, 2020 article was written by a professor of biology (Loike) who rather seemed to be raising hopes that COVID-19 would soon abate or that effective anti-viral treatments would soon be available for COVID-19. No such treatments appeared in the first half of 2020 (although by now they exist). The professor stated the following:

" Several reports have even presented data of potentially effective anti-viral treatments for this coronavirus. It is still too early to assess some encouraging news from China that indicates that the spread of this pathogen is abating in provinces other than Hubei, where it originated—a sign that the quarantine efforts in China may be working. People should be more concerned about the flu epidemic that typically kills between 10,000 and 50,000 people in the US each year."

The same gigantic blunder was made by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who told us about the same time that COVID-19 was not nearly as big a threat as the flu. In a February 17, 2020 interview with USA Today, Fauci said that the risk from coronavirus (COVID-19) in the USA was "minuscule." In the next 2.5 years COVID-19 would kill about a million people in the United States, more than twenty times the annual death toll from the flu. Professor Loike then stated this: "At this point in time, the CDC does not recommend wearing masks such as the N95 respirator type to avoid catching the virus, so people should not worry if stores have sold out." This advice of the CDC (repeated in February 2020 and March 2020 by Anthony Fauci in TV interviews) was foolish and disastrous. The CDC recanted such advice about April 3, 2020, when it started telling healthy people to wear masks in crowds. If the CDC and people such as Fauci had given the right advice early in the pandemic (such as advice to wear face masks until a vaccine was available), most of the million US COVID-19 deaths would probably have been prevented. In the first three months of 2020, it was as if the US press and science establishment had basically appointed Anthony Fauci as a kind of "pope of COVID-19," and the priesthood of professors dared not defy this "pope."

Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist had in the second half of February 2020:

None of these stories did much of anything to alert the US public to the growing peril of COVID-19. The "How COVID-19 Is Spread" article discouraged people from wearing face masks by saying, "The CDC only recommends these masks for people who are already infected with SARS-CoV-2." It made no sense for the article to parrot such ruinous advice, because the article had discussed how scientists did not know whether the COVID-19 virus was airborne. At a critical time when many lives would have been saved if the editors and writers at The Scientist had challenged authority rather than kneeling to it, we merely had a parroting of the CDC's ruinous advice, which the CDC recanted a few weeks later. The article "As Global Coronavirus Cases Climb, More Areas on Lockdown" mentioned only countries outside of the US, without mentioning any cases in the US, and without mentioning the US or any of its cities.

Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist had in the first half of March 2020:

None of these stories did much of anything to properly advise the US public about how to protect themselves from the growing peril of COVID-19. By this time the hospitals in New York City were starting to fill up with COVID-19 patients. The subways were spreading COVID-19 very efficiently, in subway cars where people were not wearing masks. But we still had no advice from The Scientist suggesting that healthy people wear masks.

Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist had in the second half of March 2020:

During these two weeks, COVID-19 was spreading like wildfire in places like New York City, which would have thousands of deaths by the end of March, 2020. The public desperately needed publications like The Scientist to properly advise it. But The Scientist was asleep at the wheel. We still had no article from The Scientist telling healthy people to wear face masks. This was long before there were any vaccines for COVID-19, at a time when wearing masks was of the utmost importance to prevent the spread of the disease.

It wasn't as if The Scientist was afraid at this time to be advising the public. In one of the articles above (Opinion: Stop Private Speculation in COVID-19 Research) The Scientist said "In our view, five policy actions are urgent," and listed five recommendations. But none of the recommendations were what the public needed to be advised at this time. The five recommendations were largely about how scientists could better profit from the pandemic. Among the "urgent" policy actions recommended were that "it is necessary to establish a system of public rewards for all researchers who share their knowledge, even partial, in the battle against the virus." That was bad advice, the type of advice that might have encouraged a COVID-19 researcher to withhold his findings if he was not paid for them. It would have been better for the The Scientist to have said: it is the moral duty of all researchers to share their findings about COVID-19, regardless of rewards they receive.

Finally on April 3, 2020 there was a huge change in what disease control authorities were teaching about preventing COVID-19. On that day the CDC suddenly began advising us that it was very important for healthy people to wear masks to protect themselves from COVID-19. The CDC reversed and recanted the disastrous advice it had been giving throughout February 2020 and March 2020, that people did not need to wear face masks unless they had already been infected by COVID-19.

But The Scientist had a disastrous failure in this regard. None of its articles before April 3, 2020 advised healthy people to wear masks to protect themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic which was spiraling out of control in March, 2020. Moreover, once the CDC announced its reversal about face masks on April 3, 2020 (by suddenly telling us we should all be wearing face masks when we go out in public), The Scientist failed to publicize this extremely important announcement. The Scientist should have immediately issued an article with a headline like this:

We Goofed So Bad! Please Start Wearing Face Masks to Stop COVID-19!

But no such article appeared. Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist published in the first two weeks of April, 2020:

It would be rather hard to imagine a more pathetic failure to advise the public than the failure of The Scientist during these crucial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the months when the CDC was issuing ruinous advice telling people only to wear face masks if they were sick (February 2020 and March 2020), The Scientist failed to produce any articles challenging such bad advice. Then when the CDC completely reversed its position and started telling people that they needed to wear face masks even if they were not sick (on April 3, 2020), The Scientist apparently failed to even have an article bringing to its readers this incredibly important announcement. The Scientist acted rather as if it had some skeleton in its closet that it wanted to hide: that it had failed to properly advise the public during the crucial early months of a pandemic.

For the rest of April, 2020 and in May 2020 and in June 2020 there were no helpful articles in The Scientist primarily written to advise the public on how to prevent being infected by COVID-19. When the World Health Organization on June 6, 2020 made a very important announcement reversing its previous ruinous advice by telling healthy people to start wearing face masks to prevent COVID-19, there seems to have been no article in The Scientist covering this very important announcement.

What went on at The Scientist during the first half of 2020 was not some rare fluke in which scientists acted in an uncharacteristic manner. To the contrary, the failure of The Scientist and so many scientists during this period was a textbook example of problems that have for very long plagued scientific academia, and continue to be a gigantic blight on the community of scientists. The problems are things such as groupthink, herding behavior, intellectual cowardice, lack of scholarly independence, and a tendency of scientific authorities to meekly kowtow to belief traditions, rather than independently judging matters based solely on facts, logic, observations, morality and mathematics.

The sociological situation in scientific academia is illustrated by the schematic diagram below. Each layer believes as the layers above it believes, leaving some tiny group at the top (consisting of professors at the most well-known universities) largely controlling what millions believe.

This situation is pathological and intellectually disastrous. Every scientist should be judging truth based on facts, observations, logic and mathematics, rather than just meekly parroting the opinions of other scientists. When some tiny group controls how everyone believes, there will be all too large a chance of the propagation of untrue beliefs and bad advice, in a sociological process that has been described as herding behavior, "follow the leader" and groupthink.

In the case of the early pandemic, we saw an even more dysfunctional situation. The situation is described by the diagram below, which is a slight modification of the diagram above. In this version the difference is that there are very tiny little boards or committees at agencies such as the CDC or the WHO, represented by the tiny little red mark at the very top. Instead of independently giving advice based on facts, observations, logic and math, all of the layers are dancing to the tune played by some tiny little committees or boards at the CDC or the WHO.

The tendencies of science authorities to "follow the herd" and to kneel to authority (rather than exercising independent judgment) was a gigantic disaster that helped to lead to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. If science authorities had acted properly, giving the right advice during the first months of 2020, more than half a million lives could have been saved. There was nothing the least bit inevitable about losing a million American lives by COVID-19 infection. An article in the New York Times was entitled "How Millions of Lives Might Have Been Saved from COVID-19." We read that Taiwan has suffered only 853 COVID-19 deaths, and that "if the United States had suffered a similar death rate, we would have lost about 12,000 people, instead of nearly a million." We are told that South Korea had fewer than 1000 COVID-19 deaths in 2020, and that if the US had responded as effectively, it would have lost only about 7000 in the year 2020, instead of losing more than 375,000 in that year.

The world continues to suffer enormously because of groupthink and "follow the herd" tendencies in scientific academia, in which professors act like guardians of belief traditions rather than independent judges of truth. Innumerable millions are miseducated into believing irrational ideas that are in conflict with a horde of facts and human observations. Detailing fully the damage that has been done by scientist authoritarianism would require a very long additional essay that would mention things such as (1) the incalculable mental harm and physical risk that occurred because of the construction of atomic bombs and utterly unnecessary hydrogen bombs that put the very survival of civilization at risk; and (2) the incalculable moral and mental harm arising from evidence-ignoring materialist misrepresentations of the essential nature of humans, ideas deriving from boastful socially constructed achievement legends.

Thankfully the COVID-19 death toll was kept from being twice as bad, mainly by the work of brave health care workers, ordinary people who took precautionary measures, and a large body of research scientists and other workers who worked to develop COVID-19 vaccines.

There used to be a documentary television show called Seconds From Disaster. In each episode there would be a description of how some disaster occurred. I recall one episode that taught an important lesson. It seems that a pilot had mistakenly taken off a jetliner in the wrong direction, ignoring the sun in front of him which indicated he was flying in the wrong direction. As a result of the error, the jet crashed and many people died. A review board came to the conclusion that the co-pilot must have suspected the error, but probably avoided telling the pilot about his error, on the grounds that a co-pilot would be "out of line" to be suggesting his superior was guilty of an obvious error.

In this jet crash case, meekly kneeling to authority led to the death of only dozens of people. The timid kneeling to authority that went on during the early months of COVID-19 helped lead to the unnecessary death of most of a million people in the United States from COVID-19, most of whom would probably have lived if authorities had taught properly from the beginning. Our science authorities have not learned the incredibly important lesson of this affair: that well-informed people should bravely stick their necks out and issue independent judgments and advice based on facts, logic, observations, morality and evidence, rather than just meekly "following the herd" and assuming that people above them in some pyramid of prestige have got things right. There are 101 reasons (sociological, cultural, financial and psychological) why people at the top of some pyramid of prestige may be teaching things that are dead wrong.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Why Are We Such Pushovers for the Dubious Narratives of Mainstream Authorities?

We are suckers for narratives told by mainstream authorities. A large fraction of us will tend to believe any nonsense they pitch, whenever we keep hearing the same story told over and over again.

Let us imagine an alternate history in which suspected presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was not killed by Jack Ruby. Imagine that most of the TV shows and newspapers began telling us the same story: that Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent patsy set up by some dark conspiracy to assassinate president John Kennedy. Imagine if Lee Harvey Oswald became a popular celebrity, who went on lots of television talk shows, talking about how he had been framed for the murder of John Kennedy. Imagine if the mainstream media had nothing but nice things to say about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Then on one dark and rainy night, you might open the door of your house, and see on your porch Lee Harvey Oswald pointing at you a Mannlicher–Carcano rifle. What would you say? Given all the media brainwashing you had been exposed to, there's a significant chance you would say something like this:

Hi, Lee! Oh, I see you bought me a rifle as a gift. How nice of you! Come in out of the rain, and have a cup of coffee.

Our tendency to believe any nonsense that is spouted by revered authorities was shown in the prelude to the American invasion of Iraq in March 2013. The government began telling us silly scare stories that were false. President George W. Bush asserted again and again that Iraq had terrifying weapons of mass destruction. A study found that Bush made 232 false statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, along with 28 false statements about Iraqi links to Al Qaeda. Some of the claims were absurd, such as his February 6, 2003 statement making it sound as if there was a threat of Iraq releasing aerial drones that would spray biological weapons on the United States. The claim was utterly laughable, because at the time the United States had the mightiest air force in the world, and Iraq's air force was almost nonexistent.

Bush's claims on Iraq's weapons were false, and some of his scare stories were downright ridiculous. But the American people were pushovers for the endless narrative repetition. By the time the war was launched, the White House had persuaded most Americans that the toothless Iraq was a terrifying threat. It was further evidence that large fractions of the population will believe false or absurd statements as long as they are dogmatically proclaimed by respected authorities.

It is amazing that most of the American people fell “hook, line and sinker” for the government's false claims about Iraq weapons of mass destruction. We should have learned a lesson from the experience of the Vietnam war, during which administrations (both Democratic and Republican) fed us a steady stream of outrageous lies for more than 8 years. From such an experience we should have learned to have been more distrustful of authorities in high places.

It is interesting to imagine an alternate reality in which astrologers were in charge of astronomy departments at universities. Astrology is a belief system based on the idea that the stars and planets exert some occult mystical influence on human affairs. You might think that if the departments of astronomy at colleges and universities were all controlled by astrologers, that most of us would shake our heads and ask: what has gone wrong with our astronomy departments?

But here is how things would probably work. Having abundant government and university funding, the astrologer professors of astronomy would be able to produce lots of papers trying to back up their claims. Such astrologers would use expensive computers to examine historical data, looking for particular events that were consistent with what astrology predicted on such a date. Having all of human history to search through, and tons of time to spend looking for matches, the professors would no doubt find some matches. Such matches between historical facts and astrological predictions would be described in scientific papers published by the astrologer professors. Such professors would triumphantly describe such evidence as decisive proof of the claims of astrology, that the stars and planets exert a mystical influence on human affairs. Almost any group with enthusiastic adherents and large amounts of funding can produce superficially persuasive evidence to back up its favored doctrines.

If such astrologists controlled the astronomy departments at our colleges and universities, and they were to get all their papers published in the scientific journals, and the mainstream media reported extensively on such papers, then probably most of the American people would believe in astrology. We would be captives of the endlessly repeated official narrative. Similarly, most Americans would believe in homeopathy if homepathy enthusiasts controlled the medical colleges.

When a mainstream authority holds the levers of powers and influence, it can effectively use various ad hominem techniques to marginalize the critics who point out gaps in the logic or evidence presented by that authority. So during the run-up to the start of the Iraq war in 2003, there was a great chorus of establishment voices denouncing critics of the unprovoked invasion as “peaceniks,” “pacifists,” "anti-American," "appeasers,” and “unpatriotic.” Similar tactics are used by modern authorities who try to paint as “enemies of science” anyone who questions some weakly established truth claim of a scientist.

It seems that almost any nonsensical doctrine could achieve large-scale acceptance just as long as it won large funding to push its message and got its adherents to sit in positions of power and influence. If the authorities today told us (as they did around 1500) that witches were a grave peril causing all kinds of social problems, then many an average Joe would now be arguing: hey, let's solve more of our problems, by burning more witches.

Mainstream authorities help to cast a spell on us by talking in dense jargon that may sound very impressive and learned, even if it states ideas that are poorly substantiated. But almost any nonsensical idea may sound impressive if it is stated in very technical language filled with jargon. A scientist would probably convince many that there is a secret world of life inside a hollow planet Earth, if the scientist stated the idea in a paper filled with dense jargon, twelve-letter words, and esoteric mathematical equations.

Authorities prod the sheeple to parrot the official line

Two classic psychology experiments have shown how prone we are to conform with authority, “tow the line” and go with the herd, even when doing such a thing makes no sense or contradicts the evidence of our own eyes. One such experiment is the Asch experiment. In that experiment a group of nine people were asked to judge which of the three lines in a rectangle on the right was a match for the single line in the rectangle on the left.

The Asch Experiment ( credit: Wikipedia Commons)

The first eight people would always give the same wrong answer, because they were confederates of the experimenter, and had been told beforehand to give such an answer. The only person really being tested was the last of the nine to be asked about which line on the right rectangle matched the line on the left rectangle. Even though it was quite obvious to the eye that the answer by the eight was wrong, about one-third of the participants (the ninth person to be asked) gave the wrong answer, conforming to the other eight. In the control group, in which only a single person was asked without the other 8 present, less than 1% gave the wrong answer. The lesson of the experiment: large fractions of us may judge or state illogically when we feel social pressure to conform to some majority or authoritative opinion.

Another relevant experiment was the famous Milgram experiment. Participants were told to deliver electric shocks to an unseen person in another room, whenever the person failed at some verbal task he was given. The participants were told by a scientist figure in a white coat to deliver progressively more dangerous electric shocks to the unseen person in another room. If the participants objected to delivering such shocks, they were simply told something like, “Please continue” or “It is absolutely essential that you continue” or “You have no other choice but to continue.” Two-thirds (65%) of the participants delivered what they thought was a 450-volt shock to the person in another room, even though on the machinery they were using, that level was marked “Danger – severe shock.” The person in the other room wasn't actually being shocked, and the experiment was purely to test the obedience level of the person who thought he was delivering shocks.

The Milgram experiment is usually described as if it was only dealing with obedience, but it also can be interpreted as telling us that most people are pushovers who will believe something illogical when some scientific authority asserts it. Those who delivered what they thought was a 450-volt shock were apparently thinking things like, “I don't have any choice but to continue,” or “Even the severe shock won't hurt the person,” even though such beliefs made no sense given the circumstances and the labels on the machinery. People who heard about the Milgram experiment thought to themselves things like, “So if there's ever some evil Nazi-like scientist who wants me to do bad things, I shouldn't listen to him.” They should have been making a much more general conclusion, such as, “People are way too trustful of scientific authorities – we should question their claims, and accept nothing on the basis of authority.”

Some may say: but once something gets very popular in the universities and colleges, then surely it is something we can believe in. But that's not necessarily so. The 2016 book Imbeciles by Adam Cohen tells the story of the forced government sterilization of Carrie Buck. Carrie Buck was a woman of normal intelligence who was forcibly sterilized by the government in 1927, on the claimed grounds that she was “feeble-minded.” This was done under a Virginia law passed when eugenics was extremely popular in colleges and universities. Advocates of eugenics argued on Darwinian grounds that those with inferior genes should be sterilized to preserve the survival of the fittest. The book says this on page 4: “Eugenics was taught at 376 universities and colleges, including Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, and Cornell.” The book notes that many professors were ardent supporters of eugenics, which went out of style after its ideas reached a climax under the Nazis.

The case of Carrie Buck went before the United States Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 in 1927 that Carrie Buck (a woman of normal intelligence) should be forcibly sterilized. Citing eugenics with approval, the distinguished justice Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. wrote in favor of the decision, in a decision that was quoted by a Nazi in the Nuremberg trial, who cited it as a kind of legal inspiration. Thousands were forcibly sterilized under the Virginia law, and the forced sterilizations continued until 1972. The Buck case shows how there can be diverse layers of authority that all are infected with the same false idea (something also shown by the 2003 WMD-lies fiasco, where diverse types of authorities kept feeding us the same falsehoods).

The reason why we should not trust a doctrine purely because it is taught extensively in colleges and universities is that our academic ivory towers are very prone to become ideological enclaves, where sociological effects, tribal enthusiasms and groupthink may cause some dubious doctrine to become enshrined as some “darling of the tribe.” That's what happened with eugenics for decades, and the same thing has happened to quite a few dubious doctrines that continue to enjoy undeserved popularity in academic circles.

Part of the problem is what I might call the “pinnacle perspective.” A person using this perspective will regard our current state as being the pinnacle of human progress. He may think: we can't be too far wrong, because we're at the pinnacle of human progress. The problem with such a perspective is that you could have thought in exactly such a way 500 years ago or 200 years ago. We can imagine someone during the witch-burning craze around 1500 reasoning: we can't be too far off the mark, because we're at the pinnacle of human progress. Such a person would have been very wrong indeed. To help cure yourself of the pinnacle perspective, imagine some human civilization 100,000 years in the future. What will they think about our current ideas about morality, life, and Mind? They will probably think that our ideas are largely primitive foolishness. After taking such a perspective, you may apply the proper scrutiny to the dogmatic claims of today's authorities.

Do not believe anything merely because a president, a preacher or a professor proclaimed it, but subject all of their claims to critical scrutiny.

Header 1

Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Saturday, July 23, 2022

"The Scientist" Magazine Poorly Advised the Public in the Early Months of COVID-19

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Why Are We Such Pushovers for the Dubious Narratives of Mainstream Authorities?