Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "Tucker: Bad things are happening" video.
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@trollpatroltrollingthetrol842
You have kind of hit the nail on the head by random chance when you said "you know nothing about me nor my hobbies". That's the point: this is not something to opine on if it's only your hobby. It's for specialists to figure out.
You don't do this with other subjects, do you? I mean, suppose someone asked you to referee a professional boxing match, or evaluate a design for a race-car. What would you say? You'd say "I'm sorry, but I don't know enough about boxing to be a referee in a professional match, and I don't know enough about auto-mechanics to evaluate a design for a race-car. You'll have to find someone who does know enough, and ask him!" That's what you'd say, right?
But when it comes to virology, immunology, and epidemiology, which are much more complicated subjects than boxing or auto-mechanics, you imagine that you can read the real papers and evaluate the purveyors of pre-digested information and that your conclusions and opinions are worth a shtt.
It's a mystery to me. And a surprise: for most of my life I admired and supported popular-science writers and lecturers like Steven Hawking and Stephen J. Gould. Popular science has turned out to be a very pernicious thing, because it feeds the American delusion that (in Isaac Asimov's words) "My ignorance is just as good as your science". The fact is unless you can do the math behind the science, you don't have the first clue what the science means.
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