Wikipedia has an article for Considered Harmful. “Goto Considered Harmful” was the title an editor gave to Dijkstra’s paper originally titled “A Case Against the Goto Statement”. It’s an informal tradition in computer science to write papers with this title pattern, including “”Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful”.
It was not intended to be misleading, only a reference to a crowd that I, perhaps erroneously, assumed would be familiar with this pattern.
Now, on the core of the argument. First the epistemic status says it’s uncertain about risk values and how to reduce it. I linked to a Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article about why this debunked idea still keeps coming up and the harms associated with it. Just printing articles and pointing people to them wasn’t enough. I don’t have more to say about your specific arguments because I think they’re covered pretty well by the article I linked.
This post was to point out that this problem exists, that credible experts in extinction risk (i.e. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) think it’s a worrying trend, that economic patterns are similar to past situations giving birth to extreme right wing governments and that current institutions seem to be unable or unwilling to curb Trump’s excesses.
He seems to respond to actual public opinion (from his electorate).
The article also ends with a non-rhetorical that seems to be misunderstood as alarmism.
I linked to a Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article about why this debunked idea still keeps coming up and the harms associated with it. Just printing articles and pointing people to them wasn’t enough. I don’t have more to say about your specific arguments because I think they’re covered pretty well by the article I linked.
That article is just a list of a bunch of opinions people have and it is nothing more than a gossip piece. Literally all it does is repeat things like:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president who seems unable to resist a good opportunity to propagate falsehoods (even Al-Qaida once asked him to stop making things up), also got in on the coronavirus conspiracy action. In an open letter to the UN secretary-general, he wrote that it was clear that the virus was “produced in laboratories … by the warfare stock houses of biologic war belonging to world hegemonic powers.”
and
Lentzos worries that the parade of prominent figures promoting the bioweapons conspiracy theory could weaken the global taboo against possessing bioweapons—making biological weapon research appear to be widespread.
It does nothing to even begin commenting on why these ideas keep spreading, just that they are and who is spreading them. Likewise, exactly nothing in that article responds to anything I’ve said.
It’s no wonder that linking to trash like this doesn’t convince anyone. To even get started you need to be able to link to things like this. Then you need to have people who can understand why that is credible explain it to their social circle who respect them and wouldn’t understand it on their own. And that means you need an army of people who are capable of empathizing with the very real concerns that these “conspiracy theorists” have instead of falling into the trap of arrogance to hide from their own difficulties in being persuasive and credible.
Wikipedia has an article for Considered Harmful. “Goto Considered Harmful” was the title an editor gave to Dijkstra’s paper originally titled “A Case Against the Goto Statement”. It’s an informal tradition in computer science to write papers with this title pattern, including “”Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful”.
It was not intended to be misleading, only a reference to a crowd that I, perhaps erroneously, assumed would be familiar with this pattern.
Now, on the core of the argument. First the epistemic status says it’s uncertain about risk values and how to reduce it. I linked to a Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article about why this debunked idea still keeps coming up and the harms associated with it. Just printing articles and pointing people to them wasn’t enough. I don’t have more to say about your specific arguments because I think they’re covered pretty well by the article I linked.
This post was to point out that this problem exists, that credible experts in extinction risk (i.e. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) think it’s a worrying trend, that economic patterns are similar to past situations giving birth to extreme right wing governments and that current institutions seem to be unable or unwilling to curb Trump’s excesses.
He seems to respond to actual public opinion (from his electorate).
The article also ends with a non-rhetorical that seems to be misunderstood as alarmism.
That article is just a list of a bunch of opinions people have and it is nothing more than a gossip piece. Literally all it does is repeat things like:
and
It does nothing to even begin commenting on why these ideas keep spreading, just that they are and who is spreading them. Likewise, exactly nothing in that article responds to anything I’ve said.
It’s no wonder that linking to trash like this doesn’t convince anyone. To even get started you need to be able to link to things like this. Then you need to have people who can understand why that is credible explain it to their social circle who respect them and wouldn’t understand it on their own. And that means you need an army of people who are capable of empathizing with the very real concerns that these “conspiracy theorists” have instead of falling into the trap of arrogance to hide from their own difficulties in being persuasive and credible.
Yes, it’s hard. Let’s get to work.