I don't think you're really engaging with what I'm saying. I think that you're introducing a flurry of new premises (in, if I can be honest, a Gish Gallop) in the hopes of tying me up dismissing them. Who's climate predictions? Which ones specifically? Because I could just as easily retort that we've outpaced most predictions from the Inconvenient Truth era of climate understanding, but I suspect that that would have no impact on you just as your casual claims have had no impact on me, because I suspect that you occupy a specific media realm that has supplied you with these talking points. Some of this is just absurd; there's no such thing as a climate model that can predict the temperature with guaranteed accuracy the next day, let alone years in advance. But this doesn't mean that our understanding of the interactions between air masses of varying temperatures and moisture content is a pseudoscience like phrenology. You're not just moving goalposts, you have selected a goalpost on casters you can scoot around at will.

> I want more intelligent climate skepticism, and I want it out in the open.

I'd accept that, but currently most climate and vaccine "skepticism" is just outright denial and they don't have their own evidence or data to support their claims properly. We don't need to take that seriously because it isn't serious and doesn't stand on its own merits. The onus is on them to present a valid argument for their dissent. Pushing for acceptance of "Skepticism" will be wielded like a weapon to bring people over to outright denial. I think we have an obligation to recognize that some people literally aren't capable of reasoning their way around complex issues or will not be able to understand the technical aspect of evidence required to gain an understanding and then intervene to prevent them from having dangerous thought patterns implanted in them by bad actors.

Live and let live works fine with bad ideas when everyone's motives are neutral but when people want to use these concepts for nefarious purposes they will co opt any amount of acceptance you give them and turn it into part of their brainwashing.

Do they pronounce it like Septic? Or Skeptic?

Because this whole thing is hilarious.

How to help the well actually being so actually ?

How can I take info from a poster who cannot spell????

Better put than I.

So a few things.

First, "vaccines are safe." In saying this, are you saying that every single vaccine ever created has been approved by regulators and is presently in use? Have you taken any of the HIV vaccines for example? J&J's? Merck's? Are you saying that every single one of those failed vaccines that did not pass clinical trial muster is safe?

Obviously not. So you're saying that every single vaccine that has ever been approved has been completely safe? So you would, in good conscience, tell a pre-menopausal woman that she ought to take one of the adenovirus vector vaccines for COVID? And that there's absolutely no risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia? And more generally, there's never been a Class I or Class II recall of a vaccine in history? Wow, what a revelation! I am so delighted to discover they were all false!

In terms of our present situation of COVID vaccines, my main objections concern the following:

• Requiring college-aged students to be vaccinated and boosted with mRNA vaccines when they are the cohort most at risk for myocarditis and least at risk from the disease.

• Adding the COVID vaccines to the infant vaccine schedule when it is still under the auspices of emergency use authorization. If it's to be added to a schedule, it should pass the FDA's normal rigorous testing requirements.

• Approving the bivalent booster when the only evidence supporting said approval was the generation of antibodies in 8 mice. The mass distribution of any medical product should at least require safety testing and preferably require efficacy testing as well with clinically beneficial endpoints, not the mere validation of a surrogate endpoint.

There are many more objections, but these are the most egregious ones that would have been considered ludicrous even three years ago. And this insanity is not global by the way. In Denmark, for example, the same practice mandated on our college campuses is banned due to the serious, if rare, side-effects among young men. It's also worth noting that the heads of the vaccine division of the FDA, Gruber and Krause, resigned in protest over this issue. Were they being idiots?

There is serious cause for concern here, and I would encourage you to reflect on why you're so certain there is not. I am not particularly worried about vaccines that went through the FDA's rigorous testing and requirements in years past. I am concerned about how our public health apparatus has changed for the worse.

Kind of ironic that you just go off of this presumtion you have, without any sort of skepticism towards your own perception and not even the hint of trying to back this claim up with actual data. Source = Trust me, bro

2. the peer-review process is fallible, if not ad-hoc

3. there is no universal scientific method

> Many of my future articles are based off the idea of not believing in a God, because it is rooted in existentialism.

Are you aware that there was a number of Christian Existentialists?

An amusing idea is that AI chews at Gödel's ontological proof of God, and comes up with a "Yep!".

>dominant metanarrative in the Western world

>regime approved thinking

> institutionally-supported metanarrative

If it is supposedly dominant or given to you by the authority, it does not necessarily make it more or less amenable to scrutiny because the basis for scepticism is always the question >What are your arguments, and what is your evidence for why I should believe in x, y, or z?

Massimo Pigliucci, being a scientist himself, before dismissing e.g. the denial of climage change, implicitly walks through the next step, a behaviour which constitutes the hallmark of an actual sceptic, namely proportioning one's belief to the evidence (David Hume).

In fact, he echoes Cicero—the person who introduced the term "probability" in Latin in the first place by making a calque out of the corresponding Greek term—by stating that

>Knowledge is assumed to be tentative and probabilistic.

Then he whips out the following Bayesian probability formula:

>P(claim) ~ P(evidence|claim) * P(claim, a priori)

which means: the probability of a given claim is proportional to the product of the probability of seeing the evidence as we observe it given the claim times the probability of the claim working a priori, i.e. according to the sum of all the branches of knowledge (theory).

What, instead, I find troublesome in Pigliucci's presentation is that he dismisses e.g. the quest for access to original papers pertaining to a given scientific discipline—specifically medicine in his example—as a kind of unjustified epistemic trespass or arrogance after quoting a dialogue by Plato's Socrates (which I generalized):

>...can anyone pursue the inquiry into [the sphere of a given branch of knowledge or into a fair test of a given expert of it] unless he has knowledge of [said sphere]?

>No one at all, it would seem, except the [expert] can have this knowledge—and therefore not the wise man. He would have to be [an expert] as well as a wise man.

It is, in my view, troublesome because, if one limits his or her inquiry into personal acquisition of knowledge by means of peer-reviewed scientific publications published on respected scientific journals, then these personal knowledge acquisition attempts do not necessarily constitute an instance of epistemic trespass or arrogance notwithstanding the complexity of the material under scrutiny. On the contrary, such attempts, as I see it, follow the spirit of scepticism and, in any case, should be judged against the possible weakness of arguments from authority which, as scientist Carl Sagan puts it,

>carry little weight

because

>authorities have made mistakes in the past

and

>will do so again in the future.

Indeed,

>Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

In effect, by want of a clearer argument, Pigliucci formulates an unsceptical argument from authority if he outright dismisses as unjustified non-experts' quest for access to original papers published on respected scientific journals.

Why should I?

What do you think happens when a new vaccine is created? They go through hundreds of tests and trials before they’re ever made available to the public. This goes for all medical inventions. It’s fine to be skeptical of something new but people have to learn where to draw the line. If there are hundreds of studies and a mountains of proof saying that vaccines are safe and your still skeptical, that’s just being an idiot.

One day when it's just the local group, people may say the universe is tiny, made up of nothing more than a few galaxies. We'll conclude its getting smaller because mass attracts mass and we will no longer see obvious background radiation, or we will but it will provide any number of possible reasons for it. And that will be true for a while.

Don't worry, I agree with you, be a skeptic, but also don't be. Be accep5ing, but also don't be. Shits complicated. And it's all guess work, informed guess work, and a best guess even. Suits simple.

Anyway, hello all.

Sure.

Faith is by definition having "complete trust or confidence in someone or something."

Assumption is... "a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof."

Yeah I used the wrong term and have been using it for a while. I realized that as I was getting definitions for this reply and I'm just going to leave my misplaced confidence there. I deserve to be humiliated a bit for that. Assumption was very much the wrong word for what I was going for. I was going for something closer to "Hoping everything goes okay because I have to do this but knowing things could go wrong".

With that admitted to, my point still stands (although strike the assumption bit from it). I do not have any form of "Faith" in my Doctor, Pilots, Light Switches, etc. I do not have the "Assumption" that they are going to work or everything is always going to be fine. I make preparations to get the best outcome using the best of my abilities and I roll the dice. Can't control it so I just have to try to find someone good and hope for the best. It's just how life is.

It’s how the Brits spell it

I really don't believe that at all. people just didn't want to be inconvenienced. they took any opportunity of confusion and clinged to it. we saw it when the truth about masks was concrete. they still believe masks are ineffective or downright harmful.

also bringing up Obama has nothing to do with this, except that the same obstructionist group of people are just that; petulant children.

Could you explain why they’re different. It’s worthless to just aggressively insist they are without any reasoning

Be sceptical? I'm skeptical of this...

Actually it's pretty easy to not be that guy.

...wait.

This also reminds me of the idea of reading or listening charitably- assuming the best version of the argument, or that the writer or listener simplified something to make it more legible or interesting… a well actually guy always does the opposite, looking for any detail to jump on to, whether it’s relevant to the conversation or not. I think this behaviour (in addition to being irritating) also lowers the quality of discourse in general by forcing everyone to constantly hedge their arguments against every possible obvious minor nitpick.

Hahaha I just picked up the audiobook for Calling Bullshit, it's really good!

​

Also Alexa will bleep the name out when you play it out of the speaker.

TRUE. But there’s a difference between skepticism and being stubborn in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Especially now that we have developed tools with which everybody can perfectly fake reality (ChatGPT, Diffusion models, generative AI in general). It has always been possible to convincingly fake facts, but it used to be a bit of a challenge. Now basically everyone can easily do it with a little bit of reading and tinkering around.

The 90% figure is a placeholder for healthy skepticism. Does it really matter if the correct figure is 69% or 96% when we will never, in our short lifetime, know the actual figure? Not really, no. The point is that almost everything we were taught in school about science was either completely untrue or incomplete.

If we look at what scientists have believed to be true over the span of scientific discovery, almost all of what was believed to be true was later found to be untrue or incomplete. How arrogant must we be to think that, as if by magic, that at this moment in time, we have most scientific beliefs 100% right, let alone everything right?

Let's look at the COVID-19 pandemic as a recent example. Almost everything the experts told us in the beginning was later shown to be untrue. And who knows what else we will learn with more time?

Let's look at global warming/climate change. Not a single prediction that was accepted by the majority was accurate....not one. Not a single computer model accurately predicted the temperature today. The doomsday predictions are patently absurd, yet they are widely accepted as true. Science today is so tainted by funding bias and politics that most of what is passing as science is nothing more than propaganda or drivel. Even the peer review process is largely a sham.

Let's look at dietary recommendations that have produced a hoard of unhealthy people. I can do this all day. Look at any area of science, and new discoveries are made all the time that turn what was previously believed on its head. And don't get me started on the science behind the pharmaceutical industry.

Now, of course, there are always exceptions, but exceptions don't negate the rule. At this point, it would take an incredible amount of naivete or faith to believe anything scientists say is absolutely and irrevocably true.