The Skeptics Guide #906 - Nov 19 2022 (Ad Free)
Added 2022-11-19 16:46:02 +0000 UTCDumbest Thing of the Week: Volcanic CO2; News Items: Developing New Antibiotics, China Completes Space Station, 8 Billion People, New SARS-CoV-2 Variants, Psychogeneology; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and e-mails: Clinically Proven, Billion Dollar Disasters; Science or Fiction
Comments
yup
Jess Donovan
2022-11-22 08:35:27 +0000 UTCI'm guessing you mean "easier to prove" rather than debunk. Part of the problem is we are creatures of the story. It is why cons are so successful (read: The Confidence Game by Konnikova). Reading Daniel Kahneman, System 1 gives System 2 a story to believe, and S2 is often lazy enough to accept what it's told. The right is good at telling stories (cons) that are spouted often enough to eventually be believed and vehemently defended. (I remember "learning" that white people were a minority over 40 years ago. Apparently 80% is a "minority.") Conservative think tanks are extremely skilled at this. Skeptics have science and facts, but most lack the skill to weave a story from them. Stories about science discoveries are not about what was discovered, but how they were discovered. Rationality is also not story telling. There are a million YA paranormal books, and virtually no YA skeptic books (to quote Douglas Adams: "Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds..."). I'm trying to get mine published and even the skeptic, atheist, humanist communities are not interested - skeptic fiction doesn't sell, they already tried. Richard Dawkins is (or was) working on a children's book (I got to see an early draft at CSICON 2018); at the moment still unpublished. We excel at facts, reason, psychology, logic, and a host of other things. We are fantastic at non-fiction, yet suck at weaving all we are good at into compelling fiction.
Asymetra
2022-11-21 17:25:53 +0000 UTCI'm glad you got the shot. But the bivalent shot isn't an invulnerability shield, and evolution has shown that it will find a way. As long as a huge segment of society shuns the social contract, COVID and its growing variants will sadly be with us for a long time and be as common as the flu.
Asymetra
2022-11-21 14:20:27 +0000 UTCnah
Jess Donovan
2022-11-21 08:36:59 +0000 UTCAnybody who never got the bivant shot. Only a small percentage of Americans have, which is the only reason why covid is a problem.
Ted Apelt
2022-11-20 00:36:00 +0000 UTCThat would only be true if all that stuff prevented car accidents the way the bivant shot prevents covid, just as other vaccines prevent measles, smallpox, polio, and other diseases that do not exist as far as we are concerned. That is the case right now, and it will remain so until a variant comes out that defeats it.
Ted Apelt
2022-11-20 00:34:11 +0000 UTCI have seat belts, airbags, anti lock braking, stability control, crush zones, adaptive cruise control and a collapsible steering column. I consider car accidents to be ... as far as I'm concerned they do not ...
Jess Donovan
2022-11-19 22:48:33 +0000 UTCWho are you talking to?
Robert Brewer
2022-11-19 21:39:11 +0000 UTCThere has never been a time in my life when I tested positive for covid or experienced symptoms of it, and now that I got five shots including the bivant, I consider covid to be over for me - as far as I am concerned it does not exist.
Ted Apelt
2022-11-19 18:20:52 +0000 UTCYes, it is easy to debunk that one volcano eruption would put more CO2 into the air than humans. Want to know what is even easier? That Biden fairly won the election - again we are using easy to verify numbers, in fact these numbers are even easier to verify. How to get people to accept things that are super easy to verify is a problem skeptics have not yet solved and need to figure out how to solve.
Ted Apelt
2022-11-19 17:32:05 +0000 UTC
