not so powerful that he’s able to silence the whole field.
People often parse information through an epistemic consensus filter.
They do not ask “is this true”, they ask “will others be OK with me thinking this is true”. This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.
(Loosely quoted from a famous 4chan greentext)
Daszak—who likely killed 20 million people a few years ago—is using “brute force manufactured consensus” to hide his crimes, and the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute is unwittingly helping him. This report doesn’t give any reasons why covid-19 wasn’t a lab leak. It’s just people posting an unjustified and false opinion, which other people then see and most (but not all) succumb to the “brute force manufactured consensus”. They likely got that false and unjustified opinion from a previous version of this same attack; high-status manufactured consensus spreads like a virus.
I do not think this kind of exercise helps to get at the truth or to reduce global catastrophic risks; in fact it increases them because it makes this “brute force manufactured consensus attack” easier to run.
Don’t ask people with status to post opinions, ask them to give gears-level explanations and justifications. Make them commit to cruxes. Make them give probabilities for specific testable sub-questions.
It’s a response because I am explaining how I think this works; most (but not all!) people are updating on the consensus opinion about what’s high status, and then of the remainder some are rationally lying, and there are some small number of people in the field who are both rational and honest.
I think you grossly underestimate how hungry scientists are to prove each other wrong. This is part of how you build status to begin with. Yes, there are collaborative relationships, but there are also a great many adversarial relationships. There is no top-down hierarchy, so silencing dissent in this manner is unavailable.
I do think some degree of self-censorship occurs, absolutely. Are there biases, sure. But I find the claim that any given person is so influential in epidemiology that there is a conspiracy of silence lasting quite this long rather absurd.
People often parse information through an epistemic consensus filter.
They do not ask “is this true”, they ask “will others be OK with me thinking this is true”. This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.
(Loosely quoted from a famous 4chan greentext)
Daszak—who likely killed 20 million people a few years ago—is using “brute force manufactured consensus” to hide his crimes, and the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute is unwittingly helping him. This report doesn’t give any reasons why covid-19 wasn’t a lab leak. It’s just people posting an unjustified and false opinion, which other people then see and most (but not all) succumb to the “brute force manufactured consensus”. They likely got that false and unjustified opinion from a previous version of this same attack; high-status manufactured consensus spreads like a virus.
I do not think this kind of exercise helps to get at the truth or to reduce global catastrophic risks; in fact it increases them because it makes this “brute force manufactured consensus attack” easier to run.
Don’t ask people with status to post opinions, ask them to give gears-level explanations and justifications. Make them commit to cruxes. Make them give probabilities for specific testable sub-questions.
How is this a response to my point, that you can apparently be a virologist who has worked with Daszak and still publicly disagree with him?
It’s a response because I am explaining how I think this works; most (but not all!) people are updating on the consensus opinion about what’s high status, and then of the remainder some are rationally lying, and there are some small number of people in the field who are both rational and honest.
I think you grossly underestimate how hungry scientists are to prove each other wrong. This is part of how you build status to begin with. Yes, there are collaborative relationships, but there are also a great many adversarial relationships. There is no top-down hierarchy, so silencing dissent in this manner is unavailable.
I do think some degree of self-censorship occurs, absolutely. Are there biases, sure. But I find the claim that any given person is so influential in epidemiology that there is a conspiracy of silence lasting quite this long rather absurd.