That's a fantastic quote at the end. I haven't heard it before and I love it.
RFK Jr, not RFJ Jr. (Also "their are too many examples" -> "there", and I assume "Approximately 1-2 people who get measles die" is missing a "percent of" or something.)
"One minor thing I noticed personally was when food information labels stopped saying, ‘The average man needs 2500 calories a day, the average woman needs 2000 calories a day’, replacing it with ‘the average person needs 2000 calories a day’. "
That sounds like a change in the actual recommendation (perhaps to combat obesity?) rather than *just* eliding the sex difference (although clearly that's a factor too).
Otherwise, surely they'd have changed it to "the average person needs 2250 calories a day"?
Yes, good point, maybe anti-obesity came into it too (although then surely they'd have lowered the recommendation for both men and women?). Or decided it was wrong to have them different, and so went for the lower on anti-obesity grounds (I can see it might have been too much for them to say 2250 as nowhere says this).
Either way, there's definitely something dishonest going on with the product manufacturers / restaurants / etc are saying something different from the formal guidance for social reasons.
Isn't obesity among women even worse than men in the UK, making this an unlikely root cause?
They also changed the alcohol units guidance to 14/wk for everyone instead of 14 for women/21 for men. Those two could have completely seperate causes, but's it's more parsimonious to suspect it's not coincidence.
Great post. I'm not sure society has ever really been dedicated to truth, although Scientific American falling is quite sad and the new categories of obvious lies are quite pernicious. But I don't know whether things were overall better in say the 1970s. There's a stereotype of police or mayoral statements being unreliable that's been in fiction for as long as I can remember.
I agree political statements/figures have always been somewhat distrusted. I'm not sure about police.
I do think at least in the '90s and '00s scientific and medical authorities (including places like SciAm, the Royal Society, etc.) were more dedicated to truth and less politicised than they are now.
I spent a lot of time in the comments section on UnHinged during the pandemic (not sure why, little else to do I guess, plus Tom Chivers was writing stuff for the site). There were plenty of people did not "trust the science", who were degrees of wrong varying from a basic inability to do arithmetic ("PCR testing has a huge false positive rate" or "Most of the people who died were going to die within a year anyway") up to orbital mind control lasers stuff ("the World Economic Forum is a secret world government which wants to kill us all", and so on: these folk now spend their days worrying about "15 minute cities" instead of the plandemic, AFAICT).
In their arguments did not mention the trans stuff at all, despite the average writer/commenter there also being obsessed with it. So I think you're shoehorning in your own hobby horse there. The BLM stuff is completely fair, though (and was mentioned at the time by the denizens of the comments section, ISTR).
I'd be astonished if people arguing about COVID vaccines were talking about trans in that context. The mechanism I'm postulating is a generalised decline in trust in the authorities.
The more people see the authorities are willing to say lies for political purposes, the less reason they have to trust them on any single issue. And the more crankish/ridiculous things serious authorities say with a straight face, the more appealing that nice, credible sounding podcast seems. All of the issues contribute to the generalised loss of trust.
It's a lovely theory with an appealing morality tale, but is it true? Vaccine scepticism is about as old as vaccines, though I admit new in a western (potential) health secretary. I think the chain of causation is:
1. Vaccine sceptic candidate gets significant support
2. Drops out, endorsing Trump
3. Trump wins
4. Trump values loyalty ahead of sanity and so nominates him for a role
5. The role he picks is health secretary (?!)
2. and 4. are unconnected to scientists being deliberately misleading to further the woke cause/as their protection fee from the woke mob.
1. Could be a result of such lies, but I think the thing that's done most to raise the saliency of vaccine sceptisism is covid. I think most people were way more bothered about how lockdown was handled than how trans is being handled, and that that did far more damage to respect for medical experts.
3. The evidence seems strong that there was a woke backlash component here, but that it was rather a secondary issue.
5. I'm pretty baffled by, and therefore cannot tell if it's linked or not.
You've misunderstood the point of the article. I'm not suggesting scientists et al being misleading/lying for ideological reasons is why RFK was made health secretary. I'm saying it profoundly weakens their credibility in pushing back against him and others.
I agree COVID was a major contributor to mistrust in scientific/medical establishment (indeed, I mentioned it). Overall, this trend - of authorities being willing to set aside the truth for politics - has been getting worse for a while now, hence the existence of a similar post from 2018. I wouldn't care to speculate on precisely how much trans vs BLM/COVID vs other issues each contributes, but I'm pretty sure that all of them do contribute, and that the more evidence there is of authorities blatantly lying or changing their position, the lower trust gets.
(I suspect most of us on here feel we are sophisticated enough that we can distinguish fairly well between 'the issues they lie / mislead on' and 'the other issues we can trust them on', and can go beyond the headlines to underlying documents and so forth - and I think that's probably right. But for many it will just cause them to distrust).
That's a fantastic quote at the end. I haven't heard it before and I love it.
RFK Jr, not RFJ Jr. (Also "their are too many examples" -> "there", and I assume "Approximately 1-2 people who get measles die" is missing a "percent of" or something.)
It is a great quote!
Thank you for the corrections - all now made. :-)
Maybe some kind of caching issue on the server, but they're all still showing up for me, even on a hard refresh.
Have just tried again.
Corrected version showing for me.
"One minor thing I noticed personally was when food information labels stopped saying, ‘The average man needs 2500 calories a day, the average woman needs 2000 calories a day’, replacing it with ‘the average person needs 2000 calories a day’. "
That sounds like a change in the actual recommendation (perhaps to combat obesity?) rather than *just* eliding the sex difference (although clearly that's a factor too).
Otherwise, surely they'd have changed it to "the average person needs 2250 calories a day"?
Yes, good point, maybe anti-obesity came into it too (although then surely they'd have lowered the recommendation for both men and women?). Or decided it was wrong to have them different, and so went for the lower on anti-obesity grounds (I can see it might have been too much for them to say 2250 as nowhere says this).
Either way, there's definitely something dishonest going on with the product manufacturers / restaurants / etc are saying something different from the formal guidance for social reasons.
Isn't obesity among women even worse than men in the UK, making this an unlikely root cause?
They also changed the alcohol units guidance to 14/wk for everyone instead of 14 for women/21 for men. Those two could have completely seperate causes, but's it's more parsimonious to suspect it's not coincidence.
Great post. I'm not sure society has ever really been dedicated to truth, although Scientific American falling is quite sad and the new categories of obvious lies are quite pernicious. But I don't know whether things were overall better in say the 1970s. There's a stereotype of police or mayoral statements being unreliable that's been in fiction for as long as I can remember.
I agree political statements/figures have always been somewhat distrusted. I'm not sure about police.
I do think at least in the '90s and '00s scientific and medical authorities (including places like SciAm, the Royal Society, etc.) were more dedicated to truth and less politicised than they are now.
I spent a lot of time in the comments section on UnHinged during the pandemic (not sure why, little else to do I guess, plus Tom Chivers was writing stuff for the site). There were plenty of people did not "trust the science", who were degrees of wrong varying from a basic inability to do arithmetic ("PCR testing has a huge false positive rate" or "Most of the people who died were going to die within a year anyway") up to orbital mind control lasers stuff ("the World Economic Forum is a secret world government which wants to kill us all", and so on: these folk now spend their days worrying about "15 minute cities" instead of the plandemic, AFAICT).
In their arguments did not mention the trans stuff at all, despite the average writer/commenter there also being obsessed with it. So I think you're shoehorning in your own hobby horse there. The BLM stuff is completely fair, though (and was mentioned at the time by the denizens of the comments section, ISTR).
I'd be astonished if people arguing about COVID vaccines were talking about trans in that context. The mechanism I'm postulating is a generalised decline in trust in the authorities.
The more people see the authorities are willing to say lies for political purposes, the less reason they have to trust them on any single issue. And the more crankish/ridiculous things serious authorities say with a straight face, the more appealing that nice, credible sounding podcast seems. All of the issues contribute to the generalised loss of trust.
It's a lovely theory with an appealing morality tale, but is it true? Vaccine scepticism is about as old as vaccines, though I admit new in a western (potential) health secretary. I think the chain of causation is:
1. Vaccine sceptic candidate gets significant support
2. Drops out, endorsing Trump
3. Trump wins
4. Trump values loyalty ahead of sanity and so nominates him for a role
5. The role he picks is health secretary (?!)
2. and 4. are unconnected to scientists being deliberately misleading to further the woke cause/as their protection fee from the woke mob.
1. Could be a result of such lies, but I think the thing that's done most to raise the saliency of vaccine sceptisism is covid. I think most people were way more bothered about how lockdown was handled than how trans is being handled, and that that did far more damage to respect for medical experts.
3. The evidence seems strong that there was a woke backlash component here, but that it was rather a secondary issue.
5. I'm pretty baffled by, and therefore cannot tell if it's linked or not.
You've misunderstood the point of the article. I'm not suggesting scientists et al being misleading/lying for ideological reasons is why RFK was made health secretary. I'm saying it profoundly weakens their credibility in pushing back against him and others.
I agree COVID was a major contributor to mistrust in scientific/medical establishment (indeed, I mentioned it). Overall, this trend - of authorities being willing to set aside the truth for politics - has been getting worse for a while now, hence the existence of a similar post from 2018. I wouldn't care to speculate on precisely how much trans vs BLM/COVID vs other issues each contributes, but I'm pretty sure that all of them do contribute, and that the more evidence there is of authorities blatantly lying or changing their position, the lower trust gets.
(I suspect most of us on here feel we are sophisticated enough that we can distinguish fairly well between 'the issues they lie / mislead on' and 'the other issues we can trust them on', and can go beyond the headlines to underlying documents and so forth - and I think that's probably right. But for many it will just cause them to distrust).