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He points to some true things and may quote worthwhile science in the manner of a broken clock being right twice a day, but he is just another grifter.
The better question is why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me. There are people who would lie down in traffic or give their first born to such heroes without having the ability to do the first-person epistemics needed to find out how true any of the claims are. It's hard to know why people are so gullible in certain directions, it's probably a cult thing.
The current social media environment incentivises this of course and COVID was peak grift. Don't get me wrong the establishment got a lot wrong, but that doesn't mean you just trust random people on the internet cause they have a suck it to the man attitude and a cosy supportive audience you can cult-out with. I'll inflame a few people here but Brett Weinstein and most of his COVID guests were also in this camp.
I think the answer is that these are people who can’t, because of lack of access to data or lack of ability to interpret it, evaluate claims for themselves. So they’re stuck picking which set of experts they’re going to trust.
You might disagree that RFK is more trustworthy than the mainstream, but clearly his supporters don’t.
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I happen to agree with a lot of what he says, but it's tough to debate you on this topic, because you didn't actually say anything. Your post is a lot of heat, and very little light.
Why do you consider him a grifter? What's his grift? Why do you consider a presidential candidate with the name Kennedy to be a "random person on the internet"? From my point of view, he identifies corporate and government corruption with great accuracy, and speaks well against it.
If you have the ability to do the "first-person epistemics", then please enlighten the rest of us, so we can be less "gullible". But you've made no claims, contradicted no claims, and only asserted your perceived superiority to the kind of people who may agree with the things that RFK says.
If you have anything of value to say, I encourage you to say it.
Yes fair call, it was an opinion and I don't spend any time justifying my belief. Part of it is weariness, I forget the name of the rule but it's a lot more effort to rebut systematically someones claims which they can just throw out relentlessly.
Also, I can do this work and highlight exaggerated claims but I will be proxying my trust to others, researchers etc. I haven't overseen large clinical trials or analysed the statistical evidence first hand. I have to eventually accept that large vaccine trials are done authentically and with sufficient power to detect higher rates of adverse events, or that the knowledge of mercury in the body is sufficiently progressed to give some assurance of safety. I acknowledge various incentive structures within medicine and assign priors that aren't 100% belief for any source. But the point is not how I can know I'm 100% right, it is that among the epistemic challenge I can assign likelihood to consensus view and RKJ view and because RKJ does a lot of sophistry (selective quoting), insufficient statement of details of statistics, study design etc, it's easy for me to weigh up that he seems not to be oriented to truth and so the things he says get low trust.
In short, RKJ doesn't do all the things I try to do myself in terms of epistemics (mainly acknowledging limits of his knowledge and expertise), so I apply a Kantian rational skepticism for alternative explanations. The one that fits very well is conspiratorial thinker and grifter.
Also, the grift is precisely by occupying a place that is already popular and additionally has some merit. Anti-establishment is nothing new, he just harvests it for clicks. There's nothing even controversial or courageous about stating these things in your bubble. The courageous thing to do would be to acknowledge the limits of your knowledge but the incentive landscape doesn't encourage it.
I'm happy to examine some of his claims if you have any you'd like to interrogate.
There's a long history of studies showing that tobacco products are perfectly safe. Those studies had a critical flaw however, they were funded by the same industry that stood to profit from the sale of tobacco.
If you apply this logic to the modern pharmaceutical complex, including the lobbying and legal apparatus, as well as the research and publication apparatus, I think some concern is at least warranted. Why exactly do we trust the pharma companies not to corrupt the science in the name of their own profit?
Oh I agree the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt in many ways and increasingly suspect but there's a lot of good stuff written on this already. I don't think RKJ adds to this scholarship because he makes unsupported claims.
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In my case it's quite simple. The mainstream had the power to falsely imprison me with lockdowns and did so repeatedly through 2020 and 2021. The random shit grifters did not and largely wouldn't want to. To make things slightly less personal, the amount of damage the failings of the mainstream does is orders of magnitude greater than anything their opponents can do.
It's amazing the credulity with which people were willing to accept very questionable science coming from official government groups. And yet, if some random person disagreed, that was considered "irresponsible".
People with real power and authority need to be held to a higher standard. During the pandemic, we seemed to do the opposite: Chastising dissenters while granting the authorities near universal forgiveness for the errors that were made.
I can forgive random internet anti-vaxxers for being wrong.
I can't forgive the people who should have known better: the people in power who greatly exaggerated the dangers of Covid while ignoring the suffering caused by our massive overreaction to the disease.
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