I think your points about working for the government are insightful: You couldn't pull off a conspiracy if you wanted to. You also couldn't pull off any ambitious project at all.
So I'm not sure how much being correct leads to credibility. Impressive results lead to credibility. You have no choice but to respect an institution capable of the Manhattan project or Apollo missions. Even if you disagree with every aspect of it. A lot of people alive today probably can't think of a single impressive thing they've seen a modern institution do.
The other credibility killer is that the public now recognizes these institutions as made up of distinct and flawed humans. The NYT is now just a bunch of people on twitter posting dumb shit about their lives. If they really wanted to restore credibility the first step would be to ban all reporters from having public social media accounts. The correct places for those opinions is the opinion pages. Of course that will never happen.
"In the past year or two, we saw a major push for institutions to reflect a particular ideology; many people argued that institutions preaching neutrality should instead “take on a social justice role” ....The result has been a degrading of institutions’ credibility, both individually and collectively. To the extent than institutions have accepted this change in purpose, people no longer trust them to provide the truth. That’s rational, because an institution that declares that its purpose is to pursue “social justice” as defined by a narrow set of activists has disavowed the pursuit of truth and declared loyalty to a predetermined set of beliefs."
I feel like I've said this same thing with SO many Substacks and podcasts by now, but thank you thank you THANK YOU for making me feel like I'm not going crazy. This incredibly mean, domineering, overbearing "woke" ideology has made feel incredibly alienated, and since I have no desire to ever look in the GOP's direction, I've spent the last few years feeling adrift. Thank you for doing what you do.
People do not listen to the CDC (and FDA) because they have have spewed an endless ration of BS ("the vax keeps you from getting Covid" (wrong) "the vax keeps you from spreading Covid" (wrong), "Masks are very effective" (wrong), "social distancing is important" (wrong), lockdowns work (wrong), the vaccines are safe (wrong--they're the deadliest in history after less than one year). And that's just for starters. Then there's that whole FDA wanting to keep the vax test data from us for 55 years, the CDC overruling the FDA advisory vote of 16-2 against giving children the vax, the general censorship of any doctor / scientist who challenges the hypotheses or demands to see data, and Fauci's coverup of the GoF work that the US funded.
If you can't see why millions of us find the CDC/FDA untrustworthy after nearly two years of their abominable guidance and management of the pandemic response (that defied long-established doctrines like "quarantining the healthy is counterproductive" and "mass vaccination using a non-sterilizing vaccine is dangerous and cannot achieve herd immunity") then there is truly no evidence anyone could adduce that would make you rethink things. Which is exactly why the country has gone off the rails. Yes, Covid is real, but a large percentage of the country has become members of a neurotic cult that has abandoned logic and rationality.
I worked for 27 years as a contractor supporting a large government civilian space agency. There were lots of good, dedicated civil servants there. There were also managers that played power games straight out of Machiavelli (one of them, when put in charge of a new department said to the staff "You may have heard I'm an asshole. Well, I'm your asshole now.") There were entire departments of deadwood - sent there to do busywork until they retired. Why? Because firing a civil servant for incompetence took over a year of weekly meetings and much paperwork.
But there was one overriding consideration - protect the agency at all costs. Never admit a mistake. Finding a better, cheaper way to do something can be dangerous - the budget might be cut next year! In short, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
I "almost like" this article. It makes some good points in RE: the credibility of institutions like the CDC, but the overall point of view is so fatuously left wing it kind of obscures the point. I mean if you trust an overtly ideological propaganda organ like the New York Times 75%, I don't know what to say. Didn't they win a Pullitzer Prize for pushing the Trump-Russia collusion hoax on us 24/7 for two straight years?
Except Fauci wasn't lying about masks. We've been studying masks since 1920 and they have never worked. This is the CDC's most recent Meta-Study that covers masking published May 20th, 2020. The overall conclusion, according to the abstract:
“Evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” Moreover, there is only “limited evidence on the effectiveness of improved hygiene and environmental cleaning.”
The UN has come to same conclusion and published their results in 2019. In 2021 the European CDC said there was "no high-quality evidence in favor of face masks and recommended their use only based on the ‘precautionary principle."
The Cochrane Review (a leading medical information specialist) went over 67 studies and found that face masks did not reduce influenza-like illness (ILI) cases, neither in the general population nor in health care workers.
New England Journal of Medicine from May 2020 came to the conclusion that face masks offer little to no protection in everyday life. And could lure you into a false sense of security by thinking you were protected!
A 2020 analysis by the US CDC found that 85% of people infected with the new coronavirus reported wearing a mask “always” (70.6%) or “often” (14.4%). Compared to the control group of uninfected people, always wearing a mask did not reduce the risk of infection.
And since then, multiple studies during COVID have shown the things don't work. Except the Bangladesh study, but it was literally wrong as it was 20 cases difference between two populations of 180,000 people and the masks did the following:
Cloth - Did not work at any age cohort.
Medical - Only worked for those 50 and older.
The second finding should have clued the authors in they made a huge mistake in their analysis. But often researchers use statistical packages and hack the p-value to get the results they wanted.
In the end, these people and our politicians know the masks don't work which is, in part, why they only wear them for photo-opportunities. And that's, btw, NOT A BIG GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY THING. Or some power-mad take away your rights and dignity thing.
Rather, it's your typical institutional/political 'We Must Do Something Because We're Supposed to be Able to do Something' when there is nothing they could do but say, 'good luck' and hope we get a vaccine that works! In short, it's perception management for the high-anxiety among us who need the touch-stone to believe that COVID will pass them bye...
tl;dr - Masks don't work and science has said so for 101 years. Mask mandates are mostly about politics and looking like those who mandate them are taking effective actions.
Your points about inconsistent medical advice (no-mask vs. mask) and the efficacy of vaccines (vax prevents Wuhan flu vs. vax makes you less sick) are all true. But the primary truth emerging from “two weeks to flatten the curve” transforming into years and years of endless boosters, is that the Government’s actions have done more harm than good.
The Wuhan flu is serious for the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions like obesity. For the rest of the population, the risk is very low. Many people who are infected, like the young, are asymptomatic.
With a single-minded focus in a futile attempt to eradicate a virus, Government policies have devastated millions of people who were never touched by the virus. Shutting down small businesses (while allowing major retailers and Amazon to remain open) kills jobs. These are the means by which millions of low-skilled workers – like wait staff - earn a living. When they get thrown out of work they languish, go hungry, can’t afford rent, and die of drug overdoses by the hundreds of thousands.
Let’s not forget that closing a small business is often irreversible because most owners don’t have deep pockets.
In reaction, the same government has provided trillions in direct payments to those same unemployed providing an incentive to remain at home which explains why surviving businesses can’t find workers.
Those trillions were created out of thin air, leading to the inflation we are experiencing today and into the future.
Let’s not forget people with treatable medical conditions. Hospitals were closed for elective treatment to treat the virus sufferers that never arrived. These same people were incentivized to stay home so their treatable cancer or heart disease quickly becomes a death sentence.
Looking at lost credibility from earlier misinformation is looking for reasons in the rear-view mirror. The “credibility epidemic” that’s becoming ever clearer is that the Government’s reaction to the virus was not just counterproductive but profoundly wrong.
Your points about the decline of institutional trust are well-taken. But depicting those skeptical of what "experts" have decreed about COVID for nigh two years as preferring to beat you over the head with wood rather than consider data is condescending, insulting, and hardly persuasive.
My work with government has shown me the opposite. Scientists like to make conclusive statements based on the questionable data. They throw out data they can’t explain (usually because the explanations could be very inconvenient). And need to be constantly questioned. In fact for awhile that was my job for awhile, to look at their actual data and question their conclusions. If CDC and FDA work similarly (and signs point to that being the case) then questioning their conclusions is totally rational.
This is the third article where you've used "sew" when you meant "sow". It obviously drives me crazy because I can remember that it has happened before and be irritated each time. What if people are actually doing this all the time but I don't know it because they are talking out loud so I can't see that they are using the wrong word? I need to start asking people to clarify this point IRL.
{based partly on what he thought the public was “ready to hear”}
In other words, treat the public as infants, imbeciles and domestic animals, unable to think independently and exercise agency over their affairs.
The resultant mess, has been coming for a long time, well before WuFlu. Our misplaced trust in the elite few, and lack of trust in our own common sense, opened the door for the Faucis of this world to express their dysfunction over top of our lives.
This is what they think of us ... and it spans both parties, and the body politic, to the point that speaking the unvarnished truth - from WuFlu being a lab leak, to off-label therapeutics being effective, to the hard truth that there is NO government management of health care that will resolve its problems while giving us something for nothing - is political suicide. Not even Trump could overcome this default bias in our society.
Until we are willing to FUNDAMENTALLY question both our own role in life, and the role of our various institutions, such that we are ready to assume the risk and effort of managing our own lives without any intervention from government save securing our rights ... this will not change.
There's a contrast in the undervaluing of institutional credibility in some cases (which I agree exists) with the way the FDA and CDC have approached things like tests and kids' vaccines and boosters and the new antivirals.
There, the evidence suggests they'd rather delay approval by weeks or months (over a year in the case of some rapid tests Europe is fine with) than risk (their sense of) their institutional reputation by letting something through. Even if the risk-benefit calculus looks wildly unbalanced in favor of acting quickly rather than cautiously.
(E.g., a possible handful of nonfatal myocarditis cases vs 1500 US deaths every single day, which seems like textbook straining at gnats while swallowing camels.)
At the very least, it's interesting to see what they're willing to sacrifice credibility over and what they're not. Or possibly that they underestimate the credibility hit in some cases and overestimate it in others.
You offer not a single example of anti vax nuttery that rises to the level of pure danger and evil conveyed in the constantly repeated official CDC falsehood that the jabs are “safe”. Try again.
This is absolutely the biggest lesson from the last two years. It doesn't matter what your job is or who you are, your credibility is the most important thing you have. If people stop trusting you, then the view becomes "the smarter he is, the more dangerous he is." Also, when the kooks keep getting it right and the "authorities" keep getting it wrong, it shouldn't be surprising that people start trusting the "kooks" and not trusting the "authorities".
Here's one more thing to dump on the credibility of the US health care establishment (CDC, FDA Medical boards, etc.) Take a look at the numbers for India, maintained at Johns Hopkins University. (Chrome browser works best for me, it takes time to come up.)
If you click on "India" along the left side and highlight it, and then click the "Admin1" to look at states, you can scroll down to "Uttar Pradesh". It is India's highest population State with about 220-240 million people. Its "28 day cases" are fewer than New Mexico's (pop. 2.1 million) "28 day deaths"! I've been watching this since September as the cases came down from several thousand and deaths were around 100, to 236 and 9, respectively, today. And yes, I know that it's a poor State and so the record-keeping might not be up to par, but something IS going on and it looks like they've basically "solved" COVID--in a country where their per-capita GDP is smaller than what we spend, per-capita on "Health Care". India has one State, Kerala, where the public health "authorities" have decided to do things the "European and US" way, and they have over half the cases and almost 80% of the deaths, in a state with 34 million people (3% of India's 1.33 Billion population). It looks like most of the other states have begun to follow Uttar Pradesh's lead.
Note: Maharashtra: 114 million pop, 21,922 cases, 704 deaths, Tamil Nadu: 67 million pop., 21,857 cases, 313 deaths, West Bengal: 91 million pop, 21,076 cases, 322 deaths. And on the other end, Bihar: 100 million pop, 110 cases, 3 deaths.
I think your points about working for the government are insightful: You couldn't pull off a conspiracy if you wanted to. You also couldn't pull off any ambitious project at all.
So I'm not sure how much being correct leads to credibility. Impressive results lead to credibility. You have no choice but to respect an institution capable of the Manhattan project or Apollo missions. Even if you disagree with every aspect of it. A lot of people alive today probably can't think of a single impressive thing they've seen a modern institution do.
The other credibility killer is that the public now recognizes these institutions as made up of distinct and flawed humans. The NYT is now just a bunch of people on twitter posting dumb shit about their lives. If they really wanted to restore credibility the first step would be to ban all reporters from having public social media accounts. The correct places for those opinions is the opinion pages. Of course that will never happen.
"In the past year or two, we saw a major push for institutions to reflect a particular ideology; many people argued that institutions preaching neutrality should instead “take on a social justice role” ....The result has been a degrading of institutions’ credibility, both individually and collectively. To the extent than institutions have accepted this change in purpose, people no longer trust them to provide the truth. That’s rational, because an institution that declares that its purpose is to pursue “social justice” as defined by a narrow set of activists has disavowed the pursuit of truth and declared loyalty to a predetermined set of beliefs."
I feel like I've said this same thing with SO many Substacks and podcasts by now, but thank you thank you THANK YOU for making me feel like I'm not going crazy. This incredibly mean, domineering, overbearing "woke" ideology has made feel incredibly alienated, and since I have no desire to ever look in the GOP's direction, I've spent the last few years feeling adrift. Thank you for doing what you do.
People do not listen to the CDC (and FDA) because they have have spewed an endless ration of BS ("the vax keeps you from getting Covid" (wrong) "the vax keeps you from spreading Covid" (wrong), "Masks are very effective" (wrong), "social distancing is important" (wrong), lockdowns work (wrong), the vaccines are safe (wrong--they're the deadliest in history after less than one year). And that's just for starters. Then there's that whole FDA wanting to keep the vax test data from us for 55 years, the CDC overruling the FDA advisory vote of 16-2 against giving children the vax, the general censorship of any doctor / scientist who challenges the hypotheses or demands to see data, and Fauci's coverup of the GoF work that the US funded.
If you can't see why millions of us find the CDC/FDA untrustworthy after nearly two years of their abominable guidance and management of the pandemic response (that defied long-established doctrines like "quarantining the healthy is counterproductive" and "mass vaccination using a non-sterilizing vaccine is dangerous and cannot achieve herd immunity") then there is truly no evidence anyone could adduce that would make you rethink things. Which is exactly why the country has gone off the rails. Yes, Covid is real, but a large percentage of the country has become members of a neurotic cult that has abandoned logic and rationality.
I worked for 27 years as a contractor supporting a large government civilian space agency. There were lots of good, dedicated civil servants there. There were also managers that played power games straight out of Machiavelli (one of them, when put in charge of a new department said to the staff "You may have heard I'm an asshole. Well, I'm your asshole now.") There were entire departments of deadwood - sent there to do busywork until they retired. Why? Because firing a civil servant for incompetence took over a year of weekly meetings and much paperwork.
But there was one overriding consideration - protect the agency at all costs. Never admit a mistake. Finding a better, cheaper way to do something can be dangerous - the budget might be cut next year! In short, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
I "almost like" this article. It makes some good points in RE: the credibility of institutions like the CDC, but the overall point of view is so fatuously left wing it kind of obscures the point. I mean if you trust an overtly ideological propaganda organ like the New York Times 75%, I don't know what to say. Didn't they win a Pullitzer Prize for pushing the Trump-Russia collusion hoax on us 24/7 for two straight years?
Except Fauci wasn't lying about masks. We've been studying masks since 1920 and they have never worked. This is the CDC's most recent Meta-Study that covers masking published May 20th, 2020. The overall conclusion, according to the abstract:
“Evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” Moreover, there is only “limited evidence on the effectiveness of improved hygiene and environmental cleaning.”
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
The UN has come to same conclusion and published their results in 2019. In 2021 the European CDC said there was "no high-quality evidence in favor of face masks and recommended their use only based on the ‘precautionary principle."
The Cochrane Review (a leading medical information specialist) went over 67 studies and found that face masks did not reduce influenza-like illness (ILI) cases, neither in the general population nor in health care workers.
New England Journal of Medicine from May 2020 came to the conclusion that face masks offer little to no protection in everyday life. And could lure you into a false sense of security by thinking you were protected!
A 2020 analysis by the US CDC found that 85% of people infected with the new coronavirus reported wearing a mask “always” (70.6%) or “often” (14.4%). Compared to the control group of uninfected people, always wearing a mask did not reduce the risk of infection.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6936a5-H.pdf#page=4
And since then, multiple studies during COVID have shown the things don't work. Except the Bangladesh study, but it was literally wrong as it was 20 cases difference between two populations of 180,000 people and the masks did the following:
Cloth - Did not work at any age cohort.
Medical - Only worked for those 50 and older.
The second finding should have clued the authors in they made a huge mistake in their analysis. But often researchers use statistical packages and hack the p-value to get the results they wanted.
In the end, these people and our politicians know the masks don't work which is, in part, why they only wear them for photo-opportunities. And that's, btw, NOT A BIG GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY THING. Or some power-mad take away your rights and dignity thing.
Rather, it's your typical institutional/political 'We Must Do Something Because We're Supposed to be Able to do Something' when there is nothing they could do but say, 'good luck' and hope we get a vaccine that works! In short, it's perception management for the high-anxiety among us who need the touch-stone to believe that COVID will pass them bye...
tl;dr - Masks don't work and science has said so for 101 years. Mask mandates are mostly about politics and looking like those who mandate them are taking effective actions.
So glad that I found you through Slow Boring! I spent the weekend binging your podcast, and now I’m digging in to the inaudible posts. Keep it up :)
I don't believe in conspiracy theories, and especially not government conspiracy theories, for all the reasons you mention.
However, I do believe in perverse incentives, and no incentives are more perverse than those which control bureaucracies.
Your points about inconsistent medical advice (no-mask vs. mask) and the efficacy of vaccines (vax prevents Wuhan flu vs. vax makes you less sick) are all true. But the primary truth emerging from “two weeks to flatten the curve” transforming into years and years of endless boosters, is that the Government’s actions have done more harm than good.
The Wuhan flu is serious for the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions like obesity. For the rest of the population, the risk is very low. Many people who are infected, like the young, are asymptomatic.
With a single-minded focus in a futile attempt to eradicate a virus, Government policies have devastated millions of people who were never touched by the virus. Shutting down small businesses (while allowing major retailers and Amazon to remain open) kills jobs. These are the means by which millions of low-skilled workers – like wait staff - earn a living. When they get thrown out of work they languish, go hungry, can’t afford rent, and die of drug overdoses by the hundreds of thousands.
Let’s not forget that closing a small business is often irreversible because most owners don’t have deep pockets.
In reaction, the same government has provided trillions in direct payments to those same unemployed providing an incentive to remain at home which explains why surviving businesses can’t find workers.
Those trillions were created out of thin air, leading to the inflation we are experiencing today and into the future.
Let’s not forget people with treatable medical conditions. Hospitals were closed for elective treatment to treat the virus sufferers that never arrived. These same people were incentivized to stay home so their treatable cancer or heart disease quickly becomes a death sentence.
Looking at lost credibility from earlier misinformation is looking for reasons in the rear-view mirror. The “credibility epidemic” that’s becoming ever clearer is that the Government’s reaction to the virus was not just counterproductive but profoundly wrong.
Your points about the decline of institutional trust are well-taken. But depicting those skeptical of what "experts" have decreed about COVID for nigh two years as preferring to beat you over the head with wood rather than consider data is condescending, insulting, and hardly persuasive.
My work with government has shown me the opposite. Scientists like to make conclusive statements based on the questionable data. They throw out data they can’t explain (usually because the explanations could be very inconvenient). And need to be constantly questioned. In fact for awhile that was my job for awhile, to look at their actual data and question their conclusions. If CDC and FDA work similarly (and signs point to that being the case) then questioning their conclusions is totally rational.
This is the third article where you've used "sew" when you meant "sow". It obviously drives me crazy because I can remember that it has happened before and be irritated each time. What if people are actually doing this all the time but I don't know it because they are talking out loud so I can't see that they are using the wrong word? I need to start asking people to clarify this point IRL.
{based partly on what he thought the public was “ready to hear”}
In other words, treat the public as infants, imbeciles and domestic animals, unable to think independently and exercise agency over their affairs.
The resultant mess, has been coming for a long time, well before WuFlu. Our misplaced trust in the elite few, and lack of trust in our own common sense, opened the door for the Faucis of this world to express their dysfunction over top of our lives.
This is what they think of us ... and it spans both parties, and the body politic, to the point that speaking the unvarnished truth - from WuFlu being a lab leak, to off-label therapeutics being effective, to the hard truth that there is NO government management of health care that will resolve its problems while giving us something for nothing - is political suicide. Not even Trump could overcome this default bias in our society.
Until we are willing to FUNDAMENTALLY question both our own role in life, and the role of our various institutions, such that we are ready to assume the risk and effort of managing our own lives without any intervention from government save securing our rights ... this will not change.
We have met the enemy, and he is us ...
There's a contrast in the undervaluing of institutional credibility in some cases (which I agree exists) with the way the FDA and CDC have approached things like tests and kids' vaccines and boosters and the new antivirals.
There, the evidence suggests they'd rather delay approval by weeks or months (over a year in the case of some rapid tests Europe is fine with) than risk (their sense of) their institutional reputation by letting something through. Even if the risk-benefit calculus looks wildly unbalanced in favor of acting quickly rather than cautiously.
(E.g., a possible handful of nonfatal myocarditis cases vs 1500 US deaths every single day, which seems like textbook straining at gnats while swallowing camels.)
At the very least, it's interesting to see what they're willing to sacrifice credibility over and what they're not. Or possibly that they underestimate the credibility hit in some cases and overestimate it in others.
You offer not a single example of anti vax nuttery that rises to the level of pure danger and evil conveyed in the constantly repeated official CDC falsehood that the jabs are “safe”. Try again.
This is absolutely the biggest lesson from the last two years. It doesn't matter what your job is or who you are, your credibility is the most important thing you have. If people stop trusting you, then the view becomes "the smarter he is, the more dangerous he is." Also, when the kooks keep getting it right and the "authorities" keep getting it wrong, it shouldn't be surprising that people start trusting the "kooks" and not trusting the "authorities".
Here's one more thing to dump on the credibility of the US health care establishment (CDC, FDA Medical boards, etc.) Take a look at the numbers for India, maintained at Johns Hopkins University. (Chrome browser works best for me, it takes time to come up.)
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
If you click on "India" along the left side and highlight it, and then click the "Admin1" to look at states, you can scroll down to "Uttar Pradesh". It is India's highest population State with about 220-240 million people. Its "28 day cases" are fewer than New Mexico's (pop. 2.1 million) "28 day deaths"! I've been watching this since September as the cases came down from several thousand and deaths were around 100, to 236 and 9, respectively, today. And yes, I know that it's a poor State and so the record-keeping might not be up to par, but something IS going on and it looks like they've basically "solved" COVID--in a country where their per-capita GDP is smaller than what we spend, per-capita on "Health Care". India has one State, Kerala, where the public health "authorities" have decided to do things the "European and US" way, and they have over half the cases and almost 80% of the deaths, in a state with 34 million people (3% of India's 1.33 Billion population). It looks like most of the other states have begun to follow Uttar Pradesh's lead.
Note: Maharashtra: 114 million pop, 21,922 cases, 704 deaths, Tamil Nadu: 67 million pop., 21,857 cases, 313 deaths, West Bengal: 91 million pop, 21,076 cases, 322 deaths. And on the other end, Bihar: 100 million pop, 110 cases, 3 deaths.