Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

How are we supposed to survive the Information Age when our society has failed even educated people so deeply that these hypotheses can gain traction just because some guy with literally no expertise whatsoever puts it under a byline?

I mean, we aren’t surviving it, but Jesus fuck. Many experts took their precious time during a raging pandemic to specifically examine and debunk this idea, and still some chucklefuck who is explicitly trying to sell you his book can say “but maybe...” and tons of people take him seriously.

The collective inability to filter bad information from good is literally going to be the death of our society at a minimum and quite possibly our species. It’s why you have lizard people theorists blowing up downtown Nashville. It’s why we have a reality tv president convincing a significant portion of our government to overthrow an election. It’s why QAnon now controls multiple members of Congress. And it’s why the planet is on a trajectory to become unlivable in a matter of decades and we can’t work up the political will to do anything about it.

 

questions are just being asked

 

Bad science needs to be exposed. Shushing it gives it power as far as the shallow brainpan crowd is concerned.

 

Translation: Swab the patient's nose. Put the indicated number of drops of the developer on the swab, and lay the wet end on the end of the test strip. The moisture will wick its way up the strip and a control line will turn pink, indicating that the test worked properly. A second line indicating a positive test either will or will not appear, depending on the patient's infection status.

 

That’s not what happened here

 

Virology Twitter sounds unimpressed with the display of JAQing off. Seems odd that New York Magazine would give a cover story over to a guy riffing on what he thinks might have happened despite a lack of evidence -- maybe it's a slow news month in New York. CW: Twitter threads ahead.

 

Yeah, but I'm talking about what it is that makes them there lines do their thing (or not).

 

I think the spit testing I've taken is largely via a private company, but here in Minnesota I know we've been very fortunate to have both one of the world's leading medical organizations, the Mayo Clinic, and a major public research university, the U of Minnesota.

 

someone already linked multiple Twitter threads from actual experts dunking on it.

So now I either have to do the actual work googling up all the actual, serious scientific work done on why the virus isn’t lab-made, or he (and you) get to claim victory. This is how the age of anti-expertise wins: random idiots can spout whatever they want, it takes them literally no effort to say whatever comes into their mind, but proving the truth takes significantly more effort.

 

That's why I'm curious about the fact checking.