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Seth Finkelstein's avatar

Thanks for a very thoughtful article. There's much to consider here.

For this comment, let me just make one point about the idea of "Trust the experts". Speaking as a technical person, one thing I'd say humanities types don't do well about, understandably, is science distinctions of the kind of roughly:

1) This is very well known and is "true" as well as can be said - e.g. in general, vaccines work

2) We don't really know, but this is our best estimate based on what little we have at the moment, could be wrong, but if you want an answer RIGHT NOW, this is it - e.g. how does Covid spread?

3) Somebody threw together some statistical trash to get a publication - e.g. replication crisis

All of this gets put under "Science". I know, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. But it's a pretty common tactic for right-wing liars to take case 2, which by definition is wrong many times, and use it to try to invalidate case 1. Crucially, I locate the main institutional problem here as being fundamentally with the right-wing liars, not on everyone else to always be perfect in explaining the limitations. Because I don't think such perfection is humanly possible.

There's also a complicated 4) This is likely false, but we want to justify our social institutions by cloaking them in Science - e.g. pseudoscientific racism

That's a whole different topic.

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Lorenzo Warby's avatar

I mostly enjoyed this article, but you underestimate how poorly those institutions are performing. The debate among the serious non-left on universities has been moving from “how do we fix them?”to “how do we close them down?”. https://lawliberty.org/dissolve-the-universities/

We are living in a situation of metastasizing bureaucracies and an “official” discourse that is delusional.

The catastrophising of Trump strikes me as ridiculous. He has been President. We know what that is like. In many ways, he ran a conventional Republican Administration, with the normal international result of less deaths in wars. https://hwfo.substack.com/p/global-peace-by-us-president

What Trump does is treat the (increasingly delusional) pieties used to generate social leverage by control of legitimacy in public discourse with contempt. That drives folk crazy.

Oh, and by the way, VP Harris lies, a lot. https://drewholden.substack.com/p/fact-checking-kamala-harris-at-the

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