Watch this conversation. Neil deGrasse Tyson is worse than Del Bigtree but both men are wrong. Do you know why?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1644107524797345793
NGD’s position is just absurd. Science isn’t voted on. The consensus doesn’t matter at all.
Copernicus (1473 - 1543) was alone. Not just a consensus, EVERYONE disagreed with him. But he was right in saying the Earth (and planets) revolved around the sun, thus contradicting the Aristotelian view that the sun and other planets revolved around the Earth. This theory of planetary motion had been the consensus for over 1,400 years. As you probably remember, Galileo, on the heels of Copernicus, endorsed the Copernican stance. He had trouble with the Catholic church who needed the Earth to be at the center of the world for the scriptures to be consistent. Heresy trials were commenced. Galileo faced torture if he didn’t stop publicizing the theory that the Earth and other planets revolved around the sun. He stopped (at least publicly) and was, instead, banished to house arrest for the rest of his life. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Catholic Church (John Paul II) apologized and admitted that he (and Copernicus) were right and the Church was wrong.
Del Bigtree is also wrong. He is making the common mistake of arguing from authority. It doesn’t matter what fancy degrees you have or even how logical and elegant your line is reasoning is. The only thing that matters is if your theory correctly describes what is observed. If it doesn’t, your theory is wrong.
Take the case of lockdowns and the question of whether or not they reduced cases per unit time (popularly described as “flattening the curve”.) When the effects of the lockdowns kicked in, about 20 days after they were initiated, we were supposed to see a jog to a lesser slope in the Gompart’s curve of cases vs time.
The explanations I advanced for why they wouldn’t work (see below) were posted to help people understand the principles involved in lockdowns, namely that houses are zones of stagnant air and that would be the last place you would want to send people if you wanted to reduce spread, and see that it was not only futile to enter into them, but would be destructive too in that it would cause more people to get infected. This turned out to be the case. When the collateral damage was added on top of the increased spread, lockdowns took their rightful place as the most destructive public health policy in history, surpassing even the illconcieved practice of throwing virgins into volcanos to appease the gods.
When the data started accumulating, I was proved correct. There was never any country at any time whose curve of cases vs time displayed the jog to a lesser slope on the ascending part of the curve or to a greater negative slope on the descending part as I described above. It NEVER happened. The authorities had graph after graph i.e. chance after chance, to see the folly of their ways but they didn’t change the policy. Before it started it made no sense to me (see below) but even Scott Atlas said, “We didn’t know whether lockdowns would work so it was reasonable to give them a try.”
Uh, no, Dr. Atlas.
The diagram belowshows why lockdowns do not work and are, in fact, THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what should have been done.
(Below) I saw this live while in Phnom Penh. I don’t think anyone else picked up on it because we never heard a word about this from anyone on the internet. Cuomo who was a huge proponent of the lockdowns cmakes no sense as he explains the data: Sure, people getting the most sick were predominantly older, they were predominantly minority, but predominantly at home!??, predominantly non-essential (remember, it was the essential workers who kept going to work. The non-essential workers stayed at home), not traveling!??, not working!??. And below the list, they say the exact opposite of what the list says: “STAY HOME STOP THE SPREAD SAVE LIVES” - What stupidity!
These initial findings from April 2020 were the first data that were released. They confirmed that I was right back on March 17, one day after Trump announced that we were going to go into lockdowns, “but they will be over by Easter”- remember that? These findings should have tipped off the authorities that the lockdowns were doing the opposite of what they were supposed to do but no one interpreted it correctly and the videos and posts I made were not getting through to enough people. At this point, it had been a month since I had sent emails to tucker, hannity, and cooper and cuomo of CNN. It wasn’t until seven months later, when Drs. Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta published the Great Barrington Declaration saying it would be better to direct efforts toward the more at risk populations (old and sick people) instead of putting everyone into lockdowns but even they didn’t understand why the lockdowns were bad in-and-of-themselves. They thought they protected the laptop class to the exclusion of everyone else and even but I think they were mistaken. In fact, the JHU group who did the study a year later were also wrong and I haven’t gotten anyone to come on board with me in saying the lockdowns were destructive in-and-of-themselves. This was a bone of contention between Jay and myself during our video discussions/debates. Virus accumulates in the stagnant air inside of houses!
The video…
Where would we be on C19 in particular and science progress in general if we took the advice of Neil deGrasse Tyson who believes we should always go with the consensus. or even Del Bigtree who is saying we should listen to so-and-so because they have fancy positions. Well, I would remind him that 106 Stanford Medical Faculty and researchers denounced Scott Atlas (who was right on everything except for giving lockdowns a chance. The Stanford people believed masks, lockdowns, school closures and vaccines worked. Look at medical doctors. The overwhelming majority still believe in the narrative. That is almost unbelievable to me after everything that has come out now. Not at the beginning, though. Only three people that I know of understood this from the beginning. But medical doctors would be expected to miss the physics. They would not have wanted to do anything that would threaten their positions so they believed the narrative. It fit with the political ideologies too- only surgeons have more conservatives than liberals in their ranks. The emergency room doctors and pediatricians they had on CNN were far left democrats. Leana Wen used to be President of Planned Parenthood, for example. They loved to say Trump wasn’t managing C19 properly. Well, Trump did make some huge mistakes but it wasn’t what the CNN doctors thought it was. The huge mistakes were 1) the CARES Act -don’t you love the names they come up with? the CARES Act paid doctors to kill people with ventilators- and 2) letting Dr. Birx and Fauci talk him into going into lockdowns initially and tricking him into extending them later other horrible policies they pushed on the public.
Arguing from authority was taken to a ridiculous extreme when the TV networks had Bill Gates on morning shows every day pushing the vaccines. His fancy credentials aren’t even in medicine!
Anyway, NO arguing from authority and, even worse, NO going with the consensus. Lets go with the arguments that make the most sense before the data is available and with which the data correlates most accurately. Remember, if your theory doesn’t agree with the data, the theory is wrong, regardless of the fancy degrees earned by the people who advanced it. Climate change has been plagued by the same stupidity: Obama proposed spending 100 trillion dollars on climate change policy when it made absolutely no sense and people like Neil deGrasse Tyson supported it because “97% of climate scientists agree…”
Reid, This is actually splendidly rendered. It is a shame you do not get more exposure, because this is exactly what I thought about that conversation.
I spend way too much time these days discussing Galileo. Sheesh.
Thanks for writing this. Dead right, as usual.
I watched that interview with so much frustration. I was waiting on Deltree to say, "but what if the consensus is manufactured?" Then come with some of the receipts showing the establishments corruption. But he never did.