> But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.
Dissent to the dominant opinion in any scientific field is always tricky, but that is a self-defense mechanism. Over time opposing viewpoints are integrated into the body of knowledge and may or may not replace or amend it. HOWEVER when we consider anti-vax or flat earth people they are acting in bad faith and their nonsense steals bandwith. It does not reserve respect and kicking them out harshly is a very necessary defense mechanism. Call it a memetic immune response with inflammation.
True. Perhaps dissent is a poor choice of words here, because I was never against the vaccine - I would default to supporting a vaccine. More - I didn't get why everyone was so optimistic about them and asked to know more. Even that was blasphemy to a few people - but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.
> but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.
The dangerous thing about expertise in a very narrow area (which most medicine is these days) is that is bolsters confidence so much that you imagining yourself an expert in an adjacent area... not realizing that you might be missing very important fundamental knowledge.
You see this often in e.g. Nobel Disease[1], but also in more mundane settings.
I think it's unfair to characterize people who are skeptical about mRNA and liquid nanoparticle technology as anti-vax, but this is what people (including Linus) are doing.
Most people I know are pro-vax, have all their other vaccinations, but are leery of new technology being distributed under the same label. I think that's reasonable. I'm one of these people. I don't plan on taking any mRNA vaccine until we have a few decades worth of safety data on LNPs, although I think the technology and its development is very interesting. [1]
Does the net health benefit provided by mRNA vaccines probably outweigh the consequences of Covid? Probably, even almost certainly. But I'll stick to more conventional biotech for now.
In general, I think the average person hugely overestimates how much we know about biology and how much experts really know - they know 100x more than me, but still 0.00001% of what there is to know. We have a lot of hubris when it comes to science and technology.
Yet people like this who just don't want to inject anything that hasn't been studied for at least a couple of years, don't coach our opinions in anti-vaxx language. Stuff like "new species" is ridiculous and masks the actual rise of surveillance totalitarianism which uses Covid as an excuse.
Dissent to the dominant opinion in any scientific field is always tricky, but that is a self-defense mechanism. Over time opposing viewpoints are integrated into the body of knowledge and may or may not replace or amend it. HOWEVER when we consider anti-vax or flat earth people they are acting in bad faith and their nonsense steals bandwith. It does not reserve respect and kicking them out harshly is a very necessary defense mechanism. Call it a memetic immune response with inflammation.