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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19132 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?

Not if they just make up or fudge the numbers. In my field I can catch most of the bullshit that isn't outright lying. If it's far enough outside my wheelhouse, almost certainly not.

Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population? If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country. We'd just be having this conversation with inverse valence.

I maintain that:

  1. The lockdowns were popular in the beginning.
  2. Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.
  3. It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:

  1. Say only things you are confident about
  2. Stay out of the political side of debates

They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.

If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.

Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.

A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.

Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob.

During COVID, the scientific and medical communities enforced conformity, by ostracizing those like Bhattacharya and calling his ideas "unethical", and pulling the licenses of dissident doctors. They intended to be seen as a solid front.

I think Arjin responded to the first part more eloquently than I can. I'll just add that to the degree that this was pushed by scientists as a group then scientists should share blame for it as a group.

People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.

I've seen this argument before and the aim is usually to imply that because some of the lower-level scientists were correct you should not lose trust in science from failures of science-driven policy. Sorry if that's not what you're getting at here.

That idea is bullshit because nothing has changed in the pipeline of science to policy. When the public next gets some more fancy science-based policy it won't be from the random scientist who has sane opinions but from the same kind of people who got things wrong last time. If scientists want credit for being correct they need to actually speak up when the public is being told incorrect science. Otherwise what the scientists are saying among themselves is irrelevant to whether or not the public should trust the science that gets to them.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob.

And this was something deliberately cultivated by the scientific community itself. During Covid there were credentialed experts coming out against lockdowns or MRNA vaccines, etc., and the response was that it's the scientific consensus that counts, not individual opinions.

[H]ow exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

They could start by admitting that they are capable of being wrong, and when they update their advice, not pretending that We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken!

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

My suggestion would be to not inflame the population over it with a massive fear-mongering media campaign combined with insane unconstitutional regulations -- the lockdowns might have been popular-ish for the first few weeks or so, but without all the media and 'nudging' I think this would have faded pretty fast. Indeed it probably could have been nipped in the bud by China coverage along the lines of "look what the crazy totalitarians are doing now" and some pictures of Tank Man rather than "what a good idea!"

Public opinion is super malleable at the moment, is what I'm saying.

It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

That's taking it a tad far.

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