Yup.

I'm afraid that the "believe the experts" people are going to be super strident about telling people that being vaccinated doesn't change anything (which is wrong), and as a result the "don't believe the experts" people are going to think the vaccines are worthless.
The other day I had someone scold me for saying "vaccines work", saying actually it's VACCINATION that works.

That's nuts of course. VACCINES WORK.
Of course these are the same people who were yelling at us not to wear cloth masks in April 2020, because there was "no evidence that masks work" (wrong!), and wearing a cloth mask might motivate some stranger to use an N95 that could have gone to a hospital.

Remember that?
In the same bucket are the people who go around very confidently telling everyone that vaccines don't prevent transmission, and the people who go around telling everyone that 1 vaccine shot doesn't actually count as a vaccination.
Believing experts is good.

Believing your own garbled interpretation of the experts is...well, probably unavoidable.

But going around yelling at your neighbors to believe your garbled interpretation of the experts is...well...just leave expert communication to the experts, OK?

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More from @Noahpinion

24 Feb
1/Today's @bopinion post is about the "strong dollar policy", and how it might give way to a balanced (i.e. more competitive) dollar policy.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/"Strong dollar" is actually a misnomer, since it actually makes U.S. exporters weaker. The trade deficit, which has returned to historic highs, is almost certainly a reason people are worrying that the dollar is too uncompetitive. ImageImage
3/Janet Yellen has wisely refused to back a "strong dollar" policy (Mnuchin sort of did the same, but it was hard to tell).

bloomberg.com/quicktake/almi…
Read 9 tweets
23 Feb
1/Here's a Substack post about the Ivy Leagues, and our unhealthy obsession with them, and what that says about our society.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-ab…
2/Americans are OBSESSED with the Ivies and a few other small elite private schools.

The bribery scandal.

The Asian discrimination lawsuit.

Cornell changing the name of its English department.

Every story about the Ivies is Big News.
3/@mattyglesias writes that Ivies should let in more poor kids. He's right, of course...BUT, they won't.

slowboring.com/p/fancy-colleg…
Read 19 tweets
21 Feb
Clubhouse has unbundled the "discussion" part of Twitter from the "news" part. That's good. People who just want to talk now have a place to talk without being subject to constant dunking, reply-guying, etc.
Substack, meanwhile, has unbundled the "long-form writing" part of Twitter. It's just a better place to lay out your thoughts. Of course other blogging services like Medium help with this too. But Substack's email list integration helps broadcast to a large-ish audience.
The smallish number of people who denounce Clubhouse and Substack are going to fail. Their denunciations might keep a few people off the platforms for a while, but eventually people will realize these are good platforms, and will simply migrate there.
Read 5 tweets
19 Feb
1/OK, here's a thread about my beloved home state of Texas.

I strongly believe that Texas CAN be The Future if it wants to. But not if it clings to dying technologies.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/texas-vs-the…
2/Texas governor Greg Abbott is going on TV and lying through his teeth about the causes of the blackouts!

3/And this is providing fuel for culture-warrior liars like Tucker Carlson to go on a crusade against renewable energy:

Read 13 tweets
19 Feb
1/Here's a thread about the column that Larry Summers called "the year's most naive".

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Inflation is low. So why are Summers and a couple other people (like Olivier Blanchard) warning that government borrowing and spending could lead to rampant inflation?

Heck, the spending they're scared about is smaller than the CARES Act!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/larry-summer…
3/Well, my (charitable) answer is that they are afraid of a POLICY REGIME CHANGE.

To most people, "regime change" sounds like a war, but in econ, it means a change in the way policymakers make policy.
Read 19 tweets
18 Feb
By the way, this appears to be a reboot of the theory of "race suicide" from the early 20th century. W.S. Wallace claimed that immigrants caused native-born people to work harder and have fewer kids, this negating the effect of immigration on population.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_suic…
But note that Wallace argued that immigration lowers fertility by making people work HARDER! Carney argues that immigration lowers fertility by REDUCING work.

Remember, the only thing that matters to the anti-immigration people is the policy conclusion: Brown Men Bad.
Read 4 tweets

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