Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "UnHerd" channel.

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  4. ​ @SuperKripke   There's no basis for you to speculate on why I sided with Professors Gupta, Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, for I didn't get into those reasons. Your flat assertion that it was to confirm my feelings, along with your dwelling on the fact that the three professors were outnumbered, however, do give me a basis for speculating on why you'd say so. More like an open invitation or an insistence, nearly. But on grounds of infra dig I shan't oblige you. I'll just address the two matters generally. First, as to their being outnumbered, there is no automatic obligation to stand with majority opinion qua majority opinion on any matter. Only a blindness to one's own positive delight in obedience to social or institutional pressure could lead to a belief in such an obligation. When it comes to science that goes double at least. (Majority opinion and "scientific consensus" on Galileo was that he was a poor scientist and a wicked heretic besides.) I hold that scientific consensus as an aim in itself is deeply un- scientific, for it ignores the fact that scientific truth — or any truth — ultimately resides in the individual mind, not in authorities, textbooks, government agencies, holy books or inquisitions, or anywhere else. This latter view also happens to be the only one which justifies scientific debate. For without it we all might as well just come to blows and settle every matter that way. The opposite view can be summarized by saying that scientific 'consensus' (a word very loaded and rather empty at the same time, but let that pass) is always to be obeyed because it has a tendency to be upheld over the longer term. A mere tendency, notice. (If speaking about Galileo strikes you as mawkish and dated I offer the example of the Nobel laureate Dr. Barry Marshall. Incidentally, my best friend probably owes his life to Marshall's gallant disregard for consensus.) Such an opposite view is all very well if one's ideal is "getting on," but it ignores the striving after truth value which is the aim of science in the first place. Not helpful. A rigid commitment to getting on smacks of politics. Corrupt politics at that, as a glance at today's Russia will suggest. (The counterpart of the consensus-is-all view in the political realm is that any elected leader is the best leader because the people are always right, which is patently and axiomatically untrue. The real legitimacy of elected leaders rests in an un-exalted, perhaps somewhat surprising and probably depressing locus; namely, the people's right to be wrong. This helpfully indicates to us why science and politics are thankfully two very different realms, and why to mix the two is to court disaster.) It pains me to explain such things to a grown person who's obviously "been to college." Secondly, as for my feelings, I don't hesitate to acknowledge that I have them, nor am I the least bit ashamed of them. Anyone claiming not to have them, or even disclaiming the high value personally put upon them, is merely flaunting her or his vanity. What is important is not to extirpate or even ignore one's feelings but to be aware of them, first, and secondly to examine them. Only then can we assign value and mental work to them. Feelings alone can lead one to choose science as one's life's work in the first place, after all, and only feelings can command strictness of thought in carrying out scientific or any other kind of work. It's only unexamined feelings running loose at their own service which are to be disparaged. It is very important to keep this in mind at all times. Lastly I turn to the other topic you raised, the next pandemic. On it I perforce have almost nothing to say. I'm not vain enough to imagine I can anticipate its nature. My sole view at this stage is that the very idea that we can decide in advance of it what the best course of action ought to be is pure folly. An opposite view reveals everything one might possibly need to know about how anyone's mind works, or doesn't. I regard any further communication with such a mind as lost time. So I insist on being left alone. But I shan't use the mute button and deprive anyone of an opportunity to show a redeeming social virtue. Whatever you wish to say, if anything, just write it in reply to one of your own above posts. Forgive the length of this reply, and thank you for occasioning the opportunity and the desire to express these thoughts.
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  22.  @danielwarton5343  Thanks for your reply. First, on global temperatures, I think there's a bit of room for disagreement. There's almost certainly been warming but it's less certain why this has happened. As I said there's ample reason to suspect it's human-caused but I don't consider it proved. It's something to watch carefully and adopt a cautious approach on. As fossil fuels are horribly polluting anyway---entirely apart from any carbon effects---the current move away from them led by private business and individual consumers can only help. Who doesn't want a clean environment? But yes I think people have been increasing our numbers much too fast and it threatens the environment, prosperity, and global security. Did you know that 10% of all humans ever to live are alive today? If we could drift slowly back down towards four or five billion simply by couples having three or fewer children, thereby amounting to a replacement rate just under 2.0 per couple, we'd ameliorate those threats. (I don't recall the planet seeming barren of people back in 1985 when there were five billion people. Nor was it in 1900 for that matter.) Besides that, the better parents can afford their children, the better for the whole family. I'm not talking about social engineering nor, as one moron accused me, eugenics (!). I'm suggesting merely that the whole world do what all the rich countries have done for the past 50 years: have small families. And it's really too bad they didn't join us earlier. All people could live in greater security. All the best.
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  45.  @G360LIVE  Thankfully, it's not necessary for everyone to be vaccinated to keep the flu down. (Nor will it be for SARS-CoV-2.) As you have no doubt heard, transmission can be suppressed effectively with levels of immunity across the population as low as 40% or even lower, depending on the virus in question. If you are suffering anxiety over the pandemic, I suggest you spend some time watching the YT channel of the Yale University epidemiologist Dr. David Katz. The media ignores all scientists who don't fully believe in the most dire predictions expressed in breathless, panic-making language. In reality these more balance-minded people constitute at least half the research community. The media think they are absolutely doing the right thing by cherrypicking the most scaremongering scientists, believing that only by doing so can they make people behave correctly. I find this not only dishonest, but also patronizing, officious, insulting, and paternalistic, and it has ended my longstanding trust in news organizations. In the end, I think their distortions will lead people to be surprised when the pandemic fizzles out. They've been media-conditioned to think it will be worse and last longer than is likely. I would bet that many will refuse to believe it's ending. Recently I've noticed that US deaths (7-day trailing daily averages) have fallen quite steadily to a 94-day low. From the August peak of 1,178 deaths they are down to 725, which is 40% lower. They were last this low on July 10. Yet this is not mentioned in the news, a typical sort of occurrence throughout the pandemic. Hear out Dr. Katz. This professor is a highly qualified researcher into epidemics from one of the world's highest-ranked universities, and he is very, very far from alone. Best wishes.
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  51. In fact, his popularity suffered almost zero over his crushing of the protest against him with martial law. The reason: The media supported him on it a thousand per cent. It thoroughly demonized the protestors as right x stream mists, though clearly they were not. The ploy worked because most Canadians have been programmed over the decades to regard even moderate conservatives as morally unacceptable, practically as monsters. The education system has been tightly in the grip of the left for half a century. So this video gets the trucker protest issue wrong. Actually, polling records clearly show that the PM's popularity took its decisive and lasting hit immediately when his wife left him a year and a half later. (Freddie badly misinterprets most of what happens across the Atlantic, and always with an air of great confidence.) It sounds ridiculous, and it is, yet it is profoundly revealing about liberal and farther-left Canadians, who are broadly speaking about 60% of the electorate: Most think that women are ipso facto wonderful, undoubtedly superior to men, and humanity's natural moral leaders. Indeed it was the very fact of his flagrant effeminacy that put Trudeau in office in the first place and kept him there for 9½ years. For the electorate he was the most acceptable type of man, namely an ersatz woman. Note that the coup de grâce for his prime ministership came last month, not when Trump launched his fresh round of attacks on him, but when his finance minister Chrystia Freeland resigned in anger at her upcoming demotion. Simply put, Trudeau was installed in office, kept there, and at last removed, by the country's left-indoctrinated gyneolaters.
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  58.  @danielwarton5343  wrote: "After this is past we will see what the true cost of the last few months have been." I don't see how the cost across the Western world alone can come in under $20t---cash costs, lost production, future interest on borrowed money, deflated asset prices of all sorts, the future cost of lost education, the future cost of damaged health aside from covid-19 itself, and much more. Even if the shutdown doesn't go on that much longer it could easily hit $50-100t. And is there much reason to believe that even 2m lives were saved across all its billion people? (This is a plausible IFR of 0.25% with a very high infection rate of 80%.) These mere Fermi calculations imply a stupendous cost of $10-50m per life saved. I don't begrudge families the necessary money spent sparing the lives of their loved ones. I should hardly wish to be the one deciding on the matter. But it's got to be admitted, we've never spent so much money saving lives ever in history. Not even remotely close. It surely stands very high among the most staggering sacrifices in human history, perhaps even at the top, I don't know. Its effects will be felt well past mid-century, its reverberations for much longer still. And how much was necessary and how much avoidable? How much better could we have done if the coolest heads and brightest minds were in charge, as it seems was the case in the East Asian democracies? What did it cost us to allow the media to whip up fear and stifle reasoned debate on the pandemic response? And how much political and economic power is swiftly being transferred to China? It makes me nauseous to consider all these questions.  I feel rather like the doctor at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai, moved by what he saw to no more coherent response than to simply utter "Madness... Madness... Madness!" My worst fear is that the friendly, smooth-running, stable, and prosperous order achieved in the West after the Second World War, which was already damaged significantly in the present century through sheer mishandling by its governments and citizens alike, will very shortly be washed up. If I considered the West my loathsome enemy, I would at this moment be squirming and howling with pleasure.
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  150.  @footballnerd277   Thanks for your reply. An IFR is not a single number that applies everywhere. Just like a homicide rate, it's an average that applies to a given population. So when the dust settles on the pandemic it will have been observed that the US , Canada, Japan, and Somalia all had different IF rates. The extent of their respective hospital resources and the average health and average age of their populations will have been among the important factors in this. So would the whole shape of their overall pandemic responses. For the same reasons NYC and Idaho can be expected to have differing IFRs just as they have differing homicide rates. And differences are sustained through increasingly granular examinations. The Bronx and Brooklyn Heights too have differing homicide and IF rates. As do New England boarding schools and New England nursing homes, as well as various population cohorts such as UK young adults vs the UK middle-aged. So don't be too quick to point to a population with a higher IFR (e.g. New York state) and conclude that it falsifies the professor's assertion. In time the New York IFR may to an extent be offset by far lower IFRs such as we are seeing elsewhere in the US and around the world. The US northeast, southern England, and Lombardy may well prove to be outliers . A 0.05% IFR across a billion infected people (very roughly the maximum number of people in the West that could pick up the virus) implies 500,000 deaths. So as the IFR at present looks more like 0.2-0.6% (or 4 to 12 times higher) her estimate does indeed appear too low. But as it is very unclear how many people remain susceptible to infection and also how many of those would be vulnerable to a serious case or to death, we don't know how close to the end of the pandemic we are. Possibly the virus, as the professor asserts, has already picked the vast majority of the low-hanging fruit available to it (excuse the metaphor for people elderly, sick, and crowded together) and will make its way through the rest of the population causing a vastly lesser rate of serious illness and death. It's too soon to tell. She is not alone among epidemiologists and other academics in expecting the IFR to plunge to below 0.2%. And I don't know about you, but putting---as she does---special emphasis on keeping one's head while others grow panicky, on developing the widest and longest-term outlook possible, and on resisting all temptation to join the herd for the sake of its security, are all things that I ordinarily see as merits. They are not to be found everywhere, to say the least.
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  211.  @sunseeker2009  Ignore that accusation of elitism and racism, kiddo. Don't let frivolous crap like that get you down, and do hang on to your sense that careful use of language is important and has something to do with personal merit. But I disagree somewhat on your point about the "poor old lady [who] died from coronavirus." Keep in mind that it's extremely important for officials to know exactly what level of illness and death the virus is causing. I ask you this: What are we to make of it if we see a surge of deaths recorded in one period of the year followed by a period a short while later with a much lower number than we'd expect based on the average rate of deaths during the same months in recent years? Accurate collection of data and careful analysis is important, but through them it may be established that the 'missing deaths' may be a result of the very old and sick dying mere weeks or months before they would have, had no pandemic occurred. The loss of any days of life is tragic, as indeed a loss of mere hours may be considered tragic in its own way. But the tragic element, although present in the background while an epidemiologist is thinking about this (why would there even be a field of epidemiology if we didn't all find death tragic?), is not the primary concern here, it's the power of the virus to shorten lives, and like it or not, weeks don't count as much as decades. When death totals during a pandemic are looked at, we subtract expected deaths from the total because deaths happen at a certain rate anyway and it's pandemic-caused deaths we're studying. Subtracting expected deaths doesn't mean we don't care those people died. It's not callous. Death is a part of life and can't be avoided, so we accept it. Not to do so is unhealthy psychologically. Those deaths we can potentially postpone through medical and epidemiological research are what we focus on. So don't make too much of anyone minimizing up to a point a slight curtailment of life. When someone is dealing with numbers that describe huge populations it's only natural to consider the larger effects more important. That's why people will be happy when the national rate of deaths falls from hundreds a day down to a couple. It's not like two people dying isn't sad, it's just immensely less sad than hundreds dying. Just my opinion. Cheers.
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  212.  @sunseeker2009  I suggest caution in giving credit to the Guardian article of 2009 and the Wikipedia article on Prof. Sikoram. There is an eerie similarity to accusations made against another UnHerd interviewee, the German epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski. Formerly a professor in Germany, he was afterward long the head of an epidemiology department at Rockefeller University, a graduate research university in New York City. Despite his senior role he was not a professor there, but it was alleged incorrectly, according to him, either carelessly or deliberately, by USA Today, that he claimed to be one. He was a successful and respected academic, so it seems unlikely that he would make such a bizarre and easily falsifiable claim. Yet after publicly sharing unpopular opinions concerning the pandemic, he was faced with the accusation. Rockefeller University promptly issued an indignant statement to the effect that not only was he not a professor there, but that they also abjured his opinions on the pandemic. In my view it appears he was smeared for his opinions. Having watched his UnHerd interviews (now removed from this channel by YouTube!) I find him more credible than USA Today (and YouTube management). I hasten to add my view that university administrators are a species of invertebrate whose indignant news releases are best completely ignored. The more someone knows about university presidents and their underlings, the more likely they will agree with me. So I'm not surprised to find Prof. Sikoram accused of an offence so unlikely-sounding for a man of his eminence, to find his Wikipedia article edited to include this material, nor to find the university he was formerly affiliated with distancing itself from him vigorously on the least pretext, nor to find a very left-wing paper like the Guardian making allegations against him after he criticized the NHS whilst also characterizing it as being the darling of the left. Ordinarily, Wikipedia, ICL, and the Guardian are acceptable sources on a range of topics. But this is the age of thoroughgoing partisanship, and institutions that could at one time be trusted for impartiality no longer can be. I'm sad to say that all three can be considered creatures of it. Thus, none of the three can be trusted on matters the least controversial. It's a pity.
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  248. ​ @Vinthis1  Thanks for your reply. Again I find plenty to agree with in what you say. I agree that Trump's speech is ordinarily painful and embarrassing to listen to. It gives the impression of mediocre verbal intelligence and an unattractive personality, which are of course serious demerits in a president. These and other shortcomings led me to vehemently oppose his election four years ago. And I agree that of many of his supporters seem like disturbed cranks, some of whom are frightening. Indeed, If the dullard, the ignoramus, and the paranoiac could find a warm welcome only in the Republican Party, I would save all my revulsion for it alone. Four years ago, I did. But since then I've had a much closer look at the Democrats and found such people in great abundance there too. It turned out the party had changed a lot since Obama was elected, without my really noticing, and now is actually on top for sheer psychiatrical derangement. Quite an accomplishment. So looking for a party open only to the fully sane appears to be out of the question. The US doesn't have one. As for the cognitive fitness of the two candidates, I guess we're not going to agree. All I would like to add is that if the same mental lapses we've seen coming from Biden came instead from Trump over the past year, the media would have somehow hounded him off the ticket, or at least tried to. But they have given Biden a pass because they revile Trump. When it comes to uniting the country I find neither Trump nor Biden up to the task, nor even willing to sincerely attempt it. There's more political hay to be made in disparaging the other side than in reaching out to it, and in fact the partisans who dominate both parties like it that way and demand it. Here, too, I give the prize to the Democrats, for dividing the people along lines of identity seems much more baked into their messaging, and that's a deal-breaker. Biden's powers, not just mental but political, too, were never quite formidable, and they now appear spent. Despite being their nominee, he is not at all popular among Democrats and for that reason seems unlikely to be able to lead them. Thus they will lead him, the more extreme and the rabid partisans among them, I mean, and I greatly fear a wind vane in high office. I don't trust him on China either, and it's the most important foreign policy file of the era by far. China is not on the same team as the US in any way. Since Xi came to power in 2013 its government has been distinctly hostile to the US, the West, and the countries in its region, and increasingly harsh to its own people. To me this spells serious danger and demands a strong response, but I sense Biden is still as overly trusting and accommodative of China as he was during his eight years as vice president. Trump's China policy, while leaving a certain amount to be desired, has still been a major step in the right direction. Thanks for the chance for me to sound out my own thoughts on these things in a little bit of detail. It can be a way of finding out more exactly what I think. I will end by agreeing that the choices are pretty terrible --- again. Last time I thought Clinton was less terrible, this time I think it's Trump. Possibly a show of previously unseen merit by Biden or a Trump debacle of some sort during the remaining campaign could change my mind. I doubt it but it's not inconceivable. At least Biden finally agreed to debates.
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