cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/176030
I have posted this here for its particular relevance to the current awfulness of a plethora of far right crackpots bullying a vaccine scientist in an attempt to force him into a farce of a debate.
The nearest analogy I can come up with is putting a researcher in a room with a monkey. Then, tell the researcher that to win, he has to convince the monkey of his research. Then, tell the monkey that to win it has to completely smear the researcher with fecal matter.
These farcical calls for debate are a sham, designed only to keep quacks, cranks, and charlatans in the spotlight, to continue to give them a platform with which to spread their brand of snake oil. While rigorous debate can be an useful tool to find truth and meaning, it has its limits. For a debate to be a tool of truth, it requires at a bare minimum that the parties involved are acting in good faith, and that both parties share a common ground in that they have a healthy respect for empirical truth. RFK Jr. has neither good faith or an interest in truth. He just wants more opportunity to spread his metaphysical cancer to more, to convince people to willingly forego their faculties of logic and reason.
The scientific method obviously needs to be updated to include impromptu and largely performative “debates”, like so:
(Courtesy of https://mastodon.social/@rvawonk@newsie.social/110578828279071059)
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/rfk-jr-joe-rogan-and-vaccines/
Steven Novella also makes a great case for not debating these jerks.
Truth be told, I’m not wondering. Pandemics is the greatest fail of the leadership, the show of wrong actions, shadowplay, manipulations and lack of clarity. People who know absolutely nothing about virology and large scale management began to observe contradictory actions and announcements, so it absolutely had to begot numerous conspiracy theories.
And sad thing is that public debate is dead. We no longer want to discuss, we want to clash and “win”, everything goes.
I blame Twitter, Facebook and other social sites that allowed and taught Internet nobodies to respond to top heads and experts in the field with every possible equivalent of “you suck, lol”.
