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How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.
It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?
No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead. Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?
I wouldn't go quite so far but it's just open-and-shut correct that many people can't properly evaluate the things that we use to establish the safety of vaccines, like randomized trials. Add in the possibility of fraud/bias (which is a legitimate concern in academia and science) and that almost certainly rises from "many" to "most." Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?
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.
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.
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 If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country.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:
I am sympathetic to the problem here, because I do think it is a real one, but "not lying" (or perhaps with unnecessary charity, "not giving confusing, contradictory, or wrong advice") is a good place to start.
Of course, given that there were geographic cleavages in a lot of the response, having a state-by-state approach to these questions is also an underrated solution. We actually got to see that in action during COVID, as a lot of COVID rules were made on a state-by-state basis, and it seems to me that was mostly ignored on both sides in favor of arguing about whatever the CDC had said most recently. Which is unfortunate!
What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.
I think this really depends on the institution and circumstance. Sometimes the institutions actually are hostile to you.
I don't think NASA is a good example; their mandate means they were always going to have much less friction surface with the general population than most of what we call "institutions".
Perhaps you're right. On the other hand, though, we should expect this to increase their competency, though, since they are going to be less distorted by that friction; instead it seems their competency has declined.
NASAs competency has been consistently lousy since the end of the Apollo program, no?
I don't know enough inside NASA baseball to say exactly when there seemed to be a fall-off, but I do seem to recall some screw-ups in the 1970s with the Mars probes. None of that stuff seems as severe as the SLS slow motion dumpster fire, but perhaps that's recency bias?
I have a loosely-held mental model that the Great Depression/New Deal/Second World War/GI Bill shook loose a lot of latent American talent and channeled it into the public sphere. That talent persisted until relatively recently! If you went into, say, the Department of Energy at 25 in 1950 and retired at 75, you worked until 2000. But (for a variety of reasons) there's been a talent decline (as well as a lot of restraint on administrative action) since then, and it's manifested in a gradual way over time as competent people are, more often than not, replaced by less competent people.
I reckon that's an oversimplication at best but I do think it makes sense.
The STS (shuttle) was also a slow-motion dumpster fire. At least until Challenger exploded, at which point its pace increased.
I don't think it's a matter of time or talent, but just incentives. The public and the politicians were very interested in the moon program, and cared a great deal about results in the form of putting Americans on the moon (and getting them back!). Later programs didn't have either that mandate or that pressure.
Possibly almost as important was Werner von Braun's retirement, but that couldn't be the full story because there were a lot of things to the moon program besides the rockets themselves.
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