Horribly broken content moderation practices at LinkedIn make the Microsoft-owned social network actively hostile to scientific progress and press freedom, it seems.
Hello Fab,
Thank you as always for a very interesting episode.
I’m writing this almost one week after listening to the episode, so my bad memory will not help me much with the context, but here goes!
I would like to start with something you said at the start of the episode. You used the expression “Vaccines are good and they work”.
I think I understand what you want to say, but I would like to highlight a point: This is a blank statement about “all vaccines”, which, from my point of view, brings us to some not-so-good territory.
There are hundreds of vaccines, each one of them has been studied in different ways.
Only based on that data collection, that someone can say, and forgive the tautology: that any particular vaccine is good and effective to the degree that it was tested/measured to be, and on average!
The human body is a complex system, and the way vaccines work needs a lot of studies to be understood (and sometimes not completely).
Any medication should be proven, and it will always have usage information and attached warnings and side effects.
Sorry for the nit-picking!
Now switching to another topic: before listening to the episode, I had a topic that I wanted to share, but you raised it in the latter part of the episode.
The topic came to mind while listening to a Sam Harris podcast: he chose to start his episode by warning against the statement: “do your own research”.
In summary, he wanted to remind of the importance of experts, and to warn of the dangers of hobbyist science.
In the latter part of the episode, you raised the same topic, and how different actors are trying to monopolize the truth, and we come to what I usually term: truth by decree.
Of course, none of us can be an expert in everything, so we have to delegate finding truth finding to others that we trust. But we should always be wary of this choice, and from time to time, to try to revisit this decision.
Apologies for the long feedback, and a hearty ITM!