[ExI] Some virus statistics

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Tue Jul 14 19:18:57 UTC 2020


On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 2:19 PM Darin Sunley <dsunley at gmail.com> wrote:

*> you went immediately to argument from authority*


That's not always a bad thing, especially when it comes to medicine. Nobody
can be knowledgeable about everything, so if every expert specialist in the
world on a very complicated subject like epidemiology, agrees on something,
people who have spent their life studying the subject, then I think they
are much more likely to be correct then you or I are after we've only been
studying the matter for 20 minutes or so. That's why people read scientific
journals and believe that what they say is probably true even if they
haven't personally carried out the experiments described in them. People
that we trust, because they have proven to be right in the past, judge new
research and if they think it's not valid they don't publish it in their
journals and if they think it is valid then they do. It's a web of trust, it's
what the cryptographic program PGP uses to ensure that a public key really
belongs to the person that it claims to.

And by the way, I don't think Trump has even spent 20 minutes studying
viral epidemiology or Statistical theory in his entire life.

John K Clark
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