You Got Snookered

Naturalism / Marianne North/ A Fallen Giant, Calaveras Grove, California

My Dad always used to say “you got snookered”.  Yep.  you got snookered.

Covid was always a dicey bitch.  What was even dicier was the way that the mass media took over the narrative and made it their own.  

Look, I am not protesting masks, I plan on keeping mine around for when I take public transportation and go into high-risk areas.  

I am not protesting the lockdowns.  I kinda think that with as many unknowns as the virus presented us, it wasn’t a terrible idea.  

But in retrospect, now that we have the time and ability to learn from what happened and have the time for all of the data to be looked at in a serious manner.  I think that there is a lot to learn.

But I am thinking that it is well past time that we calmed the fuck down and started looking at what we have learned and how we can do better next time.  I am thinking that the first thing that we need to do is go back and do a serious re-analysis of the data acquired thus far.  Especially in the realm of diagnostics.  Kary Mullis, Nobel Laurate and inventor of PCR,  (who I had the honor of listening to in a crowded classroom in the North Biology Building back in the mid 80’s) always said that PCR was not appropriate for diagnostic testing.  Of course the God-Like Tony Fauci immediately counterattacked saying that Kary knew nothing about medicine.  

Look, there the facts are out there, uncomfortable as they are for the decision makers that took the safest path that they could find.  You know, the path that really doesn’t lead you where you need to go.  But it was safe.

There is a lot we need to learn in the none-too-different future.  Disease origins, diagnostic methodology, treatment regimens, analysis of overall morbidity/mortality will all need to be openly and candidly discussed.  It can’t be a witch hunt with steely-eyed inquisitors looking to bring retribution to malefactors, it has to be real science where the falsifiable hypotheses are tested against an experimental protocol.

Mostly is is time to re-read Karl Popper:

Popper was also profoundly impressed by the differences between the allegedly “scientific” theories of Freud and Adler and the revolution effected by Einstein’s theory of Relativity in physics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The main difference between them, as Popper saw it, was that while Einstein’s theory was highly “risky”, in the sense that it was possible to deduce consequences from it which were, in the light of the then dominant Newtonian physics, highly improbable (e.g., that light is deflected towards solid bodies—confirmed by Eddington’s experiments in 1919), and which would, if they turned out to be false, falsify the whole theory, nothing could, even in principle, falsify psychoanalytic theories. They were, Popper argues, “simply non-testable, irrefutable. There was no conceivable human behaviour which could contradict them” (1963: 37). As such, they have more in common with myths than with genuine science; “They contain most interesting psychological suggestions, but not in a testable form” (1963: 38). What is apparently the chief source of strength of psychoanalysis, he concluded, viz. its capability to accommodate and explain every possible form of human behaviour, is in fact a critical weakness, for it entails that it is not, and could not be, genuinely predictive. To those who would respond that psychoanalytic theory is supported by clinical observations, Popper points out that

… real support can be obtained only from observations undertaken as tests (by ‘attempted refutations’); and for this purpose criteria of refutation have to be laid down beforehand: it must be agree which observable situations, if actually observed, mean that the theory is refuted. (1963: 38, footnote 3)

From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy