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Notes -
First time?
Two scattered thoughts I've been recently having somewhat related to your post.
Standards (and being correct) are for undergraduate students.
Once you you have that magical paper that says 'PhD' on it, you can pretty much shit and piss all over the textbooks and still be lauded for being an "expert". "The War on drugs", "The War on terror", Covid, many such cases.
I still remember carefully making sure that no variables were linearly dependent, the models were crossvalidated and the performance metrics were passed through a hypothesis test before passing in statistical modelling project during my undergrad; and then seeing the same professor just YOLO numbers in SPSS without a concern in the world if it made sense or not for her research work. But she has a PhD, everything her hands touch is magic, or so I've been told.
I'm sure the further from academia and the further from the hard science you go, the more this is the case. Both the lack of expectation to be correct, and the amount of status you receive for having that paper.
This commentator you talked about is probably from the West.
Ukraine is close to home. And the closer to home it, the more bad the bad guy is. Syria, Palestine, Mexico, Armenia, North Korea are all too abstract, too far away, they are not even real people. The most evil of all evils is he who threatens your income/status.
It's always been politics. I'm surprised you are not jaded to this possibility.
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