[FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

Sat May 8 00:11:58 EDT 2021

Good effort from your part, but not good enough for me. Everyone on earth
makes honest mistakes, that's different from deliberate BS. I quote from
the reference you gave:

*"Reading Gillespie's response, I don't think he was being deliberately
misleading. I think he genuinely does not understand the article he
co-authored"*
I quote further from your reference to support my view that there is no
evidence that Gillespie is accused of deliberate BS:
"*Like I said, I obviously have different ideological preferences than
Gillespie and other libertarians. But he isn't serving his audience very
well. He's a pretty good writer, but he doesn't understand these issues at
all. He thinks he can make up for his lack of understanding by relying on a
co-author who, by dint of her total fealty to libertarian dogma and the
ability to throw around a few numbers, has him convinced she knows what
she's talking about. In reality she's a total hack. I really advise
Gillespie to confine himself to subjects he understands (motorcycles?
picking up chicks with a snap of the fingers?) and find a fiscal writer who
is able to make the libertarian case from factual premises.* "
Accusing Gillespie of not understanding the issue is fair, but it's totally
different from accusing him of deliberate BS.

A bit off-topic, I find styles of arguments like the above annoying. Why
accuse Gillespie of picking up chicks? Not wrong, it's obviously not meant
seriously, but IMO it degrades the quality of the discourse. I like
listening to the opinions of people with different world-views, but because
there is so much information out there one can't listen to everyone. If a
person uses a style like that I choose to ignore him.

On Sat, 8 May 2021 at 00:22, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, you're doing a good job of laying out why one's stance on some issue
> can be inertial, robust to perturbation. And it's useful to note that
> "trust" is a spectrum. I don't trust Reason, especially not Gillespie. But
> that doesn't mean I don't read it and, however, negligibly, fold what I
> read into my world view. Further, to be clear, I don't think anyone
> believes it's possible to persuade you out of trusting Reason/Gillespie.
> That's not the point of calling his assertion bullsh¡t. The purpose of
> calling bullsh¡t is to highlight biases.
>
> If Gillespie had said things like "building on 30 years of hard work",
> "safety testing and other government mandates with *real but perhaps
> limited* utility in this case", etc., then nobody would be calling it
> bullsh¡t. Such hedging qualifiers are hallmarks of credibility. Gillespie,
> like many ideologues, tend to gloss over or avoid such hedges entirely.
> And, hence, those of us who look for them as hallmarks for credibility
> notice their absence and call bullsh¡t.
>
> Even with hedging qualifiers like that, of course, we're all biased. So
> any opinion we render will be a smattering of facts and imaginary
> conjecture. But the careful among us will make some attempt to say which
> parts are well-accepted fact and which parts are our own imaginary unicorns.
>
> To be clear about Gillespie and his playing fast and loose with the facts,
> this episode is worth noting:
>
>
> https://newrepublic.com/article/80140/nick-gillespie-responds-and-his-point-i-have-no-idea
>
> Again, my purpose is not to persuade you into changing your mind. My
> purpose is to help you understand why *I* (or anyone else) would call
> Gillespie's rhetoric bullsh¡t.
>
> On 5/7/21 11:07 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> > Glen,
> >
> > I like the letterstoayounglibrarian's 5W's: *Who?* Who wrote this?
> , *What? *What kind of resource is this? , *When?* How up-to-date is the
> information? , *Where? *Country of origin? , *Why? *What's the purpose of
> the source? There are so many conspiracy theories out there and it's
> sometimes difficult to distinguish BS from valid points and applying the
> 5W's will certainly help.
> >
> > It's of course not the "all and everything". There are many other tools
> for the job too for example asking whether there is a good explanation for
> a point. Sometimes I'll accept a point even if I don't have a clue where it
> comes from provided I can independently apply my mind and conclude that
> there is a good explanation for what is asserted.
> >
> > But I think we are digressing a bit. I'm still interested in whether the
> statement  "/But of course the article puts up the mRNA vaccines as
> evidence of how, because the agencies got out of the way (is
> implied), _BioNTech and Moderna had vaccines in a few days_.  That is
> deliberate BS, and I doubt the writer is such an idiot that he doesn’t know
> it."  /is a good argument against Reason.com's article? Even if Reason.com
> fails on all the 5W's, at least be fair and don't accuse them of something
> they did not say or implied.
> >
> > For me that is important. You don't necessarily trust Reason.com as a
> good source of information, that's not the point. I trust them and if
> evidence is provided that they write "deliberate BS" then I'll change my
> mind.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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