The world is a weird place, and it might just get weirder. Pretending we can control it guarantees we'll fail to make the most of what it has to offer.
Instead, start by accepting the uncertainty, and surf the wave.🌊
Enablement over control.
Instead of trying to figure out how you can control what others will think or do, understand what they need, and provide them with tools that help them be better.
Experience over expertise.
Instead of looking at credentials and authorities, see what people have a proven track record of doing at a high level. After all, real expertise should be easy to prove in practice, without being patronizing or dismissive.
Embodiment over Idealism
Instead of reading yet another book, do something in the real world, big or small, that puts your ideas to the test. You'll either inhabit them far better, or you'll find their flaws.
No amount of books on bike riding will teach you how to ride a bike.
Exploration over Exploitation
Devote at least some of your time doing things that don't have a certain return. Very often, your best results in the long run will come from serendipity and play. Accept that you might not have a thing to show for it, and you'll be richly rewarded.
En passant over Easy fixes
The things of most value, like happiness, or respect, don't yield to direct pursuit. You only get the knockoffs: Cheap thrills & respectability.
Embrace short term pain for long term gain, and before you know it, you'll have more than you hoped for.
This thread is mostly a note to self, encoding what I've learned over the last few months, searching for the principles that separate the people who I admire for their anti-fragility and mastery of uncertainty, as opposed to those consumed by anxiety, confusion, fear, and rage.
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What if... HealthNerd's investigation into IVM is actually vindicating IVM instead of proving it fraudulent? Well, A BMJ article claims we should expect 20% medical research to be Fraud. That's more than HN has found out of the studies he researched. Not randomized, but even so.
Yes, this is tongue in cheek. But this is the kind of background work he should have done before dragging the names of hundreds of researchers through the mud. Without a baseline, the implication is that we're looking for 0% bad papers, which is a fallacy. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate…
It's OK. It's not like there's a literal pandemic going on and many of these researchers are trying to help, but don't speak English as their first language, nor understand social media. After they get piled on, they'll get the message.
Donation drive is on! HealthNerd's accolytes are swarming my thread on their hero, and are definitely being incredibly constructive. This time we'll do a mass banning, because they're out in numbers.
What does it mean when we call someone an expert? Here's what Google says:
"a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area".
In this one word I think we will find the root of our troubles: 🧵
So if someone is an expert in virology, that means they have comprehensive & authoritative knowledge of virology.
But what does comprehensive knowledge of an area mean? It means to be complete.
We're expecting our scientists to claim complete knowledge of an area.
At the same time, we know that experts in the same area of a decade ago, or 50 years ago, certainly did not have complete knowledge of that area, since we've made large breakthroughs since. Are we assuming no more breakthroughs are possible?
Wow. Talk about a thread that says the exact opposite of the paper it cites. Comments🔥. 📄Quote:
"Transmission reductions declined over time since 2nd vaccination, for Delta reaching similar levels to unvaccinated by 12 weeks for ChAdOx1 & attenuating substantially for BNT162b2"
Your daily reminder that I have no idea on biology and if I can find complete and total misrepresentations within seconds of looking at a paper that a supposed public health communicator is touting, things are entirely not OK. This is not what one resorts to when one is winning.