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Notes -
I agree that sometimes, scientific findings announced at a press conference can be true. When I watched the announcement of gravity waves being discovered, I did not go into "well, they did not publish in a peer reviewed journal yet, so they are obviously full of shit".
Of course, my priors for LIGO discovering gravity waves were decent, and quite a few respected scientists were staking their reputation on that announcement.
By contrast, my priors for RFK telling his underlings "perhaps look into evil chemicals as a possible cause for autism" and them just finding The Cause (TM) after all these years because previously nobody had thought to look into exposure to drugs as a risk factor seem slim indeed. Nor does he have a scientific reputation to put on stake, I think the median medical scientist is likely of the opinion that he is a quack who has no clue about medicine and it is hard to go further down from there.
I mean, I can obviously not rule out that they found a minor risk factor which explains 5% of the autism cases, after all, the dumbest person in the world saying the sky is blue does not make the sky green, but I am very bearish on the findings living up to their sensationalist claims.
I really hope that there will not be another pandemic while RFK is in office, so that the damage he does is limited to moving NIH funding from projects mentioning trans-isomers in the application to his wild goose chases.
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