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The Science of Trust When It Comes to Trusting Science

Once again, hard-earned, “tried and true” medical knowledge is too easily replaced, among the panicking, by the untried and false. Soon it is imposed by ignorant politicians. — David Warren

You mean the medical science that gave us the concept of humours, blood letting, mercury as an antimicrobial, lobotomy for mental illness, that treated menopause as an enodricinopathy that warranted estrogen replacement, that believed gastric ulcers were due to stress, not to an infectious disease (i. e., H. pylori)…I could go on.

The trouble with most people touting “science,” whether it be this graffiti artist, his virtue-signaling rebloggers, or any of the j-school grad talking heads on TV, is that nary a one of them has ever taken an undergraduate level microbiology course, or studied biostatistics, let alone practiced medicine.

Medical science advances incrementally and any seeming breakthrough usually stands on a mountain of discarded evidence, for what is today’s standard of care was once experimental, rejected by the mainstream, or even mocked by what “science” once accepted, “trusted.”

Medicine is more art than science, a skill acquired in the close observation of the failures known as experience joined to the practical application of caring and comfort.

Whatever happened to the Jack Weinberg sentiment: “Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30,” anyway…

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Margot May 15, 2020, 1:10 PM

    Is it the same science that says a pregnant woman isn’t carrying a human baby until its born? Some science!

  • ghostsniper May 15, 2020, 2:33 PM

    The “moment of viability” is at 4 months so anything after that is indeed murder.
    LIEberal justification of convenience.

  • jwm May 15, 2020, 2:54 PM

    Have we come full circle? So now “graffiti artists” are out taggin’ walls to remind us to obey the man, and follow the TV party line? How long before the cool kids adopt a slogan like, “Do what you’re told, man!” or “Follow your orders, bro!”? Maybe they all took, “Obey Propaganda” as serious good advice.

    “Conform, dammit!”

    JWM

  • James ONeil May 15, 2020, 5:42 PM

    Shucky darn, I trust science.

    If I drop a hammer, I move my foot out of the way, if I’m on a construction site and somebody yells “HEADACHE” you can be sure I move my butt well out of the way as quickly as possible. Science tells me whatever’s coming down, be it the hammer I dropped or a hot rivet dropped from high steel, it’s moving at 32 feet per second per second and I don’t want any part of me to be the thing that abruptly stops (or tries to stop) than moving object.

    I trust ballistic science, be it the calculations to send a projectile out of a 155 mm gun to make it roughly hit a target 14 miles away or the calculations you or I do in our heads to catch a baseball.

    Yep, I trust science, but folks ordering me to wear or not to wear a mask, to huddle in place, to get thirty eleven vaccinations, to stand still and do nothing until there’s a cure for something, to only buy a car if it has 14 airbags, -nope, that ain’t science bro and I see no reason to trust the folks that say it is.

  • Jewel May 15, 2020, 6:20 PM

    https://www.barnhardt.biz/2020/05/13/a-meme-for-a-madman/

    Here in the state of Pretzelvania, where a twisted reality is enforced without pity, my better half took the kiddoes to the annual Mountville Day celebration. Huzzah! We thought it would be canceled, but the mostly scofflaw townies decided to follow guidelines for the Code Yellow Zone we live in, and were able to entice said townies to come out and cheer our meager freedom, as it is currently being doled out by our power-mad ravenous Chief Crying Wolf and Dr. Gray-Fang Wretchal Latrine.
    Well, you’d hope so, but in a vain effort to enforce antisocial distancing, people walking the two blocks from everywhere to get to the park were sent home and told to DRIVE back. Yes. Our people must be hygienically sealed in 80 degree weather inside their CARS. But wait, THERE’s MORE!
    No one could exit their cars. There were no rides, no booths, only food. Food which was categorized into separate lines that you didn’t know until it was too late and the french fry line was not the same as the hot dog line. And if you wanted to buy a cheese steak and were in the hot dog line, you couldn’t turn around and get out of the line, you had to wait in order to exit so as not to give the Batflu Cooties to disease-free carnies.
    They got in the car line at 5, and didn’t get home with their cootie-free, cold, inedible hate rations until well past 8 pm. Imagine the hell that was my husband’s, trapped in a parking lot jam with a couple of whiny preteen girls. He was almost a sobbing mess when he came home.
    Our town borrows a couple of cops from one of the more upscale burbs nearby. We have no police department. We have halfway houses, a couple of slightly attended churches, one nice pub, and a dive across the street from the pub, and we have a funeral home. Plus the AMVET hall.
    The clock never tolls at the proper time, and I wouldn’t move anywhere else.
    What is reassuring is that the cops won’t arrest or harass you if you aren’t following any specific stupid guidelines. They just don’t have the manpower.
    I am sure that the press is all over this…and how much people love being herded by the nose for their own good.

  • Casey Klahn May 15, 2020, 7:35 PM

    Science? Eat me.

    How about Bill Nye, The Science Guy? That fuck.

    When the culture turned to Science to convince us that the planet is on the skids because: warming ! and right before that they closed down the woods because: owl ! and about that time they wanted to tear down those great monuments of human industry, the dams, for: God knows why ! I pretty much had enough of contemporary Science.

    Now, models for virus deaths. Oh gawd. The University of Washington? Those marxist cucx meat-beaterz.

    I much prefer the Middle Ages. They make more sense to me, and many of the models from that age work fine for me. Also, the frontier West. That was another good time, and not too strict on Science.

    Math? Different. Physics: different. But the Scientific community and the eggheads on the inside I have little truck for.

  • ghostsniper May 16, 2020, 8:48 AM

    Jewel sed: “Imagine the hell that was my husband’s, trapped in a parking lot jam with a couple of whiny preteen girls.”
    =========
    Way back when, when sanity still prevailed, and in Pretzelvania of all places, there were 4 of us kids in the backseat and a tiny one in the middle of the front seat (no car seats and no seat belts, and no cup holders) us kids would get out of hand (“He touched me!” “No I didn’t!”) my dad would swing around in the drivers seat and crack all of us at the same time. Then about 1 minute later he’d yell, “Stop all the bawlin’ or I’ll pull this car over and make you start screamin’.”

  • Fuel Filter May 16, 2020, 10:37 AM

    Re; that pic of that moron Fucci (or whatever the hell his name is) reminded me of somethin’ I saw at Breitbart yesterday or today of some more fantastic street art by the great Sabo destroying Hizhoner Garcetti (of L.A.) for his draconian power-hungry edicts.

    Hope somebody here has the link.

  • Elmo May 17, 2020, 6:40 PM

    Who (or what) do you trust when the scientists are morons?

    It’s like my Pappy used to say, “Trust no one”.