Thread by @RobertGReeve

PSA: People who are smart at one thing mistakenly believe that they’re smart at everything.

Dave’s bio says “Prof of Organic Chemistry @Cornell. Libertarian.” His feed’s full of anti-vax rhetoric but it’s clear he doesn’t understand social media or propaganda. A thread 🧵

https://twitter.com/DavidBCollum/status/1428055669077389316

Dave’s sharing without verifying. @EM_RESUS's post is real, but when I searched for the copycats… I only saw people talking about this screenshot. Two possible explanations:

1) Twitter’s doing good moderating and taking them down
2) this screenshot is fake

Either way, Dave’s implication of conspiracy is disproven. So why might bots copy this?

Sam’s post is credible, concise, timely, emotional. Importantly, “I just left the ER” suggests credibility without vettable credentials. Is the speaker a nurse? Doctor? Patient?

Easy likes.

Bots copy posts to farm likes and followers. Your @ username AND your display name are changeable… so you can sell accounts with lots of followers.

Or bad actors can use them to run malware-spreading scams. Or run chaos agents that disrupt America’s well-being and enterprise.

Actually, bots ARE rampant in Covid-19 discourse: they demand the country reopen (and the virus spread).

Carnegie Mellon researchers believe it’s tied to Russian and Chinese destabilization efforts. The Department of Defense finds it noteworthy. basicresearch.defense.gov/COVID-19/Basic…

Dave sees a cabal trying to restrict American life, but the boring reality is that bot farms are profitable and valuable, even to individual actors with zero stake in Covid-19 disinformation.

But Dave believes his existing knowledge can explain a field he knows little about.

Based on Dave’s feed full of anti-vax retweets, I’m sure he sees a conspiracy: “'THEY' use bots to manufacture Covid-19 panic and trigger totalitarian takeover of the US.”

It’s a free country, and he's entitled to any number of his often terrible takes. cornellsun.com/2020/06/08/col…

I don’t want to pick on just Dave here, because many of the highly educated show vaccine skepticism. 11,000 PhDs surveyed, representative of the US population.

Discussion in the replies here: PhDs chiming in, proving it.

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1425728361003986948?s=20

This PhD of FINANCE is relying on “neurophysics (pharma orientation)” sounding medical enough that you don’t question it. Neurophysics is about MRIs and electricity in the brain. It is not about viruses.

He's an "empiricist." You're not.

These folks especially fall prey to this “illusory superiority,” believing they’ve freed themselves of bias.

“In a survey of faculty at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 68% rated themselves in the top 25% for teaching ability, and 94% rated themselves as above average.”

Steve Jobs is a textbook case. His work was brilliant and uncompromising. A coworker of mine had Steve tear apart his designs once, and he brags about that tongue-lashing.

Steve still thought he knew better than his oncologists and surgeons, and apples could cure cancer.

At some point, you’ve been told you're a genius so much that if anyone challenges your intellect, the only way you can fit them into your worldview is to find how they are wrong and dumb.

Dave believes he is too smart to be a “useful idiot,” a pawn in a game of misinformation.

A useful idiot (sometimes “useful innocent”) is someone who champions propaganda without understanding the deeper goals. The term is mistakenly attributed to Lenin, but it didn’t appear until the Cold War. It referred to liberals who sympathized with communist talking points.

I would hope a Cornell professor maintains healthy skepticism, even of information that aligns with his bias.

(No one’s perfect here. I have mistakenly shared misleadingly edited footage before because it confirmed my biases. Being a skeptic requires healthy doubt.)

Meanwhile a @cornell chemistry professor says whatever he wants about epidemiology, climatology, and finance.

"I spent 100s of hours reading about climate change...the climate crisis story, I think is baloney. I'm a denier, I'm a complete denier."

2nd century Christian writer Tertullian claimed that when Roman generals had victory parades called triumphs (it’s where the modern word comes from), their charioteer would whisper to them: Respice post te. Hominem te moment.

“Look before you and remember you are only a man.”

That story’s apocryphal. Tertullian’s tale isn’t confirmed by other any classical authors.

But to you true geniuses out there who say, “actually, I DO know enough to not vaccinate; I don’t trust immunologists and epidemiologists.”

I say, memento mori. “Remember that you die.”