The policy implications of media behavior are profound if examined in context. It is not as if there was nothing else going on in February 2020.
Any one of the false media narratives of the time may have changed the course of the election. For example, Joe Biden might not have even been the Democratic nominee. Or Trump might have won in the end.
Whether it is the origin of the virus, Ukraine, Putin, or Hunter Biden, things might have turned out differently. What matters is not one incident, but the number of incidents and their obvious intent.
One has to wonder how long it will take for the media to catch on to what is happening along the southern border, and what is their collective intention for ignoring it?
not-so-huge policy stakes? That's a strange take given the impact of the virus. If this thing came from gain-of-function research, I'd say it would...you know...cause us to consider *stopping* that kind of research - or at least discussing how it's regulated in an effort to stop the next pandemic. Without implicating the lab, I don't see much momentum toward increased regulation of GoF...is there?
Another implication of lab leak being true. There are individuals at the CDC and elsewhere in the federal government - not to mention big pharma and biotech companies - who have a material financial stake in GoF research, who have advocated for it, and who are now among those we have given the responsibility for policy prescriptions as well as for identifying the source of the pandemic itself(!) This is like asking the cat to give us a ruling on the case of the missing canary.
I *guess* we could all just recognize the rampant conflict of interest without getting to the final answer, but if the lab leak turns out to be proven true, it would shine a spotlight on all the words and actions taken by people like Dr Fauci (who - instead of recusing himself from making judgments on the virus's source due to his financial stake in GoF companies - wasn't just an early poopooer of lab leak, he was a principle author of the epistemic closure that pushed this hypothesis underground into the conspiracy theory basement for over a year) and - I would hope - cause a public re-assessment of the perverse incentives at work, and of the standards of independence we should expect from people who lead and staff those agencies. Getting this right and raising our standards for leadership could possibly prevent the next pandemic. I'd so those are huge policy stakes.
And not for nothing - looking back to 14-15 months ago - if we had known immediately that this thing came from a lab, don't you think it's possible the lab's records would have helped inform scientists on how to beat the virus? Maybe, maybe not...
It’s true that Cotton was treated unfairly by the MSM and undoubtedly no one was happier about that than him. You make good points that people shouldn’t be attacked for saying something they didn’t say. All that being said, the lab theory I am currently considering is that Tom Cotton was created in a lab experiment as the perfect GOP presidential candidate (heartland upbringing, Ivy League education, war vet) but the guys assembling him went to lunch before inserting the charisma/personality chip and then forgot about it. Poor guy.
Hi Matt and everyone, I'm commenting here hoping you will see this. Taiwan is seeing a huge spike in COVID. They desperately need vaccines. However, like the beginning of the Indian covid crisis, the Biden administration is extremely slow and indifferent to them. Yesterday, the head of AIT said Taiwan will not be prioritized for US extra vaccine donations. This has left Taiwanese extremely bad taste as they elected a complete pro-US and anti-China president and have compromised a lot on trade, e.g. US pork. Even from a complete selfish point of view, letting Taiwan drift towards China will destroy our semiconductor manufacturing capability (TSMC). Biden said no political consideration for vaccines. I get that. But this is very poorly thought out. Taiwan needs us now. Please share this message on twitter if possible. Everyone was saying Taiwan is a country but people barely know this. Thank you!
Hi Frank! I live in Kenya and try to raise the issue of getting the rest of the world vaccinated in this comments section whenever I find an opening. I looked at the graph that comes up on Google when you search "Taiwan covid" and it looks like Taiwan has only had double digit daily case counts a couple of times since 2020 April 6, but now it is seeing a serious spike by comparison (the shape of the graph looks similar to the spike that Kenya faced during March). Do you know if something changed at the start of May? Taiwan was definitely one of the biggest Covid success stories for a very long time.
(Sorry for posting twice, I had a typo the first time and there's no edit button.)
As a trained molecular biologist and someone with active experience in viral directed-evolution, I find the quality of the discourse on this subject to be extraordinarily bad. It is probably foolish to expect more but the scientific ideas floating around twitter and this comment section are often completely off the mark. Unless there is access to lab records, there will not be a smoking gun. But the circumstantial evidence is there. Simply put, the lab in Wuhan was engaged in research with the precise aim of generating something like SARS-CoV-2. The approaches to engineer such a variant or drive laboratory directed-evolution of such variants are straightforward for scientists well versed in the field. If such work were going on, all that would have to happen is a failure of safety protocols for an escape to happen.
It's great that Matt already agreed with concerns around gain of function research. Most people in this country don't know anything about it though, and a big part of that is that the lab leak hypothesis wasn't being taken seriously and explored in the media and political discourse (outside of Cotton and a few China hawks, while ignored by the President himself). If we want to effect policy change around gain of function research and safety, we have to make it salient to a broad community, and it becomes more salient if the lab leak hypothesis is seen s credible. So when Matt says nothing changes if the lab leak is true, I think that is just patently false and flies in the face with his usual intuition about political salience and the art of the possible.
"I think it’s increasingly clear that this was a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing, and there is in fact a serious scientific question as to where the virus came from — a question that we will probably never be able to answer because the Chinese government has clearly committed to one viewpoint on this and isn’t going to allow a thorough investigation."
Dude, I got things to do, however, I will put this to you and come back later:
(The entire group averages tee-tiny with a weight range of 4-28 grams.)
2) That particular species (intermediate horseshoe bats), had been previously tested prior to all this and had been found to be harboring many different variants of the SARS lineage (so there are a great many versions which have NOT infected humans).
3) So, there is every reason to believe the SARS family, including the ancestral version of the Covid virus, originated in bats. Full stop.
4) The lady in charge of the Wuhan biolab said last that they have a sample from 2013, that was immediately ancestrally related to Covid-19, differing by about 20% of the genetic code. I have zero reason to disbelieve her.
5) The genetic testing of Covid-19 indicates signs that the ancestral lineage of the virus was present in civets at some point. And that is all we have got on that.
6) Sewage samples collected in France and Italy in 2019 for unrelated reasons were found to have a version of Covid-19 present. Those samples were from September-November 2019. That indicates that a version of Covid-19 was spreading worldwide BEFORE November 2019.
7) If there was a lab leak it was before all the suspicious dates cited in the media.
8) The initial spread from the point of origin of the particular flavor of Covid-19 that was the main source at the beginning of the epidemic in January would have to have had occurred via people traveling in airplanes. The key point here is that throughout 2019 there would have been a lot of passenger air travel between Wuhan and the US/Europe, but there ALSO would have been a lot of flights going back to Wuhan from the US/Europe.
9) If a lab leak occurred, it is extremely unlikely (almost certain) no one in the lab would have none or noticed this had occurred. In the movies, if a virus leak occurs, lot of alarms go off and red lights start flashing, and that is approximately 100% bullshit. All it would take to kick off the spread of a virus, is a masked up lab worked leaving the wrong vent open when working with the virus, and managed to circulate it in the the air of the room for someone to get infected.
No one, including the specific lab workers involved, would KNOW that they had allowed an infectious virus to spread into the room they were working in. They would not they know if one of them had gotten infected when they went home from work, clean room or no clean room. That's why these things are called accidents.
Worse, it wouldn't need to be the version that eventually spawned the epidemic, it could be an early version that once it started spreading, also started mutating. Eventually it would come up as the version that spawned the epidemic. (Note: it doesn't have to mutate like that, but it can, and we know it DID.)
10) Unless the lab, and the city the lab is in, and lots and lots of the surrounding countryside were collecting biosamples, then they have no idea of how the virus developed from the 2013 version to the current version.
11) Unless the CCP specifically bio-engineered the specific version (or the near-specific version) that turned into the epidemic, they have no fucking idea where the goddamn thing came, or if there even was a lab accident.
They do not know, they have no way to check to see if it did, and! They. Will. Never. Know. How. That. Happened. Or. Even. If. It. Did.
And neither does anyone else involved, or biology/medical types from outside China who weren't involved.
One thing that has become gradually more clear in the last months, and something the article does not address, is that people in the virology/biomedical community have not communicated clearly what they believe. I was stunned to read Bakers article. I was also stunned by the Baltimore quote in Wade's. Here is an eminent virologist saying on the record that when he first saw the virus sequence (Jan-Feb of 2020?) he thought it was a `smoking gun'! I cannot believe that his reaction is so different from other virologists (many of whom are his academic descendants). Yet no-one communicates this for a year! I am stunned that people with clear conflicts of interest have been allowed to be the public face of the scientific community on this unchallenged. Why does the Science letter (calling for more investigation) appear now and not a year ago? If what is says represents the views of the community, then their views have been misrepresented for a year. If that happens, then it is their responsibility to correct. If they don't, then it starts to look like they are not actually looking for a real investigation.
I don't think it is that simple. I think it is a situation where the senior people in the field who would normally speak up are used to choosing their words very carefully, and the communication with the public has been somewhat opportunistically hijacked by a few twitter savvy individuals. The Science letter is a (long overdue) pushback against it.
I agree. Scientists are accustomed to drawing conclusions based on data. Some of the approaches being used by the Wuhan lab could generate SARS-CoV-2 type variants that could be indistinguishable from a virus that evolved naturally – ie directed evolution. Other more hypothesis-driven approaches will be more evident but if done well won’t provide conclusive evidence. Only lab records will provide the answers and, in some scenarios, even that won’t be definitive. A group of highly credentialed scientist calling for a serious investigation (Science May 14) tells all you need to know about the possibility that it is a lab leak.
Excellent piece. Fascinating to see the evolution of reporting on Cotton's comments. Makes a nice contrast with the non-evolution of SARS-CoV-2 described by Alina Chan (Great link).
And about Chan - it may be worth keeping in mind that Chinese virologists *MAY* have their own political axes to grind with respect to the Chinese government.
For example, you link to a now-on-hold PolitFact piece from Sept 2020 as a good example of "the “fact check” complex... taking an increasingly hard line against laboratory origin theories that it claimed had been debunked by scientists."
Fair enough. But that FactCheck was of a Tucker Carlson interview with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, described as "a virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong". On Tucker's show:
"The virus’ genome, she said, indicates that it was modified. She accused the Chinese Communist Party of silencing those who claim otherwise."
Might be science, might be non-American politics. Her science has been criticized, and I'm not attempting to judge it.
Alex Ward at Vox also discounted her, noting criticism of her specific paper while acknowledging that a lab leak of a non-manipulated virus was still on the table.
With Tucker Carlson and the many other click-baiting headline hunters looking for the most provocative story, the Discourse Police have a hard time preserving space for a sensible conversation. Maybe there's a Gresham's Law for Twitter debate - bad speech drives out good.
"My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading."
I strongly agree with this. I have a lot of opinions that I don't share widely because I know they'd be poorly received (and/or taken in bad faith). I might express these one-on-one, but would be very disinclined to do so to an audience, or in a recorded medium.
I also think this is a partial cause of the "voters are more complex than we tend to think" - that the *average* opinion on something isn't necessarily what most people think, but is often a triangulation between a lot of more-extreme idiosyncratic thoughts.
Just curious: many mentions here of Tom Cotton being factually wrong in the past; examples? I genuinely don't know, not being snarky. I read about the Ranger story which . . . ok, I guess? The only other thing I remember well is his piece for the NY Times last summer.
In that instance, he stated an opinion that a majority of Americans also appeared to hold. For my money (literally, at the time), the NY Times needs to contend with such an opinion. Whether they want to be the Paper of Record or help lead the Resistance; either way, it serves you well to contend with majority opinion, I think.
I thought the way they handled that was badly wrong. Now they appear to think the opinion of most Americans cannot be published, because there's too much risk. That's bad; people didn't stop having the opinion. That wasn't persuasion.
These are the Cotton incidents with which I'm aware, genuinely. Right now, it's beginning to look like our media (over here on the left) is trying to gift him the Republican nomination in 2024. But again, I really am curious (no snark!) about the anti-fact escapades of Cotton. Because we will absolutely have to contend with this guy going forward.
Agree with all of this. I'm not sure I can think of instances that show me Tom Cotton egregiously lies, embellishes, or makes bad faith arguments more often than a run of the mill R or D politician. But the three things I know about Tom Cotton are this, the NY opinion piece you reference, and the piece he wrote about why he wouldn't vote against certifying the election.
There's one thing to be learned from this of which we can be certain. With few exceptions journalism devoted to scientific issues sucks badly. One of those exceptions happens to be Julia Belluz. That lady knows what a null hypothesis is and what a test of significance means. On the other hand most journalists don't know what any of this jargon means. They don't know who is expert or who isn't. They know who will take their calls. They don't really know what questions to even ask or whether or not what they are hearing is bullshit. Scientists very rarely speak in certainties. Which is why, when you read a piece of journalism that begins with the phrase "A new study shows...." and you look at the actual study you find it did no such thing. At best the thing claimed to have been shown is cited as a possible interpretation of the data.
I imagine if the Bad Orange Man (and yes he was really really bad) and the GOP had gone full lockdown authoritarian when covid broke out, we’d be on an alternate timeline where the left would have been screaming “open up” and “masks don’t work!” and the entire tribal discourse would have been 100% reversed.
So, the only antivaxxer close relative of mine is a cousin back home in Europe. He’s so left-wing he thinks Merkel is a Nazi, yet he also shares articles on Facebook about how awesome Ron DeSantis is. (He has been to the US only once as a tourist years ago.)
What would change is gain of function research would be shown to be either untenable or necessary.
Just reading this, and one thing I’ve learned is that Matt is all caught up with Mike Duncan’s Revolutions Podcast
The policy implications of media behavior are profound if examined in context. It is not as if there was nothing else going on in February 2020.
Any one of the false media narratives of the time may have changed the course of the election. For example, Joe Biden might not have even been the Democratic nominee. Or Trump might have won in the end.
Whether it is the origin of the virus, Ukraine, Putin, or Hunter Biden, things might have turned out differently. What matters is not one incident, but the number of incidents and their obvious intent.
One has to wonder how long it will take for the media to catch on to what is happening along the southern border, and what is their collective intention for ignoring it?
not-so-huge policy stakes? That's a strange take given the impact of the virus. If this thing came from gain-of-function research, I'd say it would...you know...cause us to consider *stopping* that kind of research - or at least discussing how it's regulated in an effort to stop the next pandemic. Without implicating the lab, I don't see much momentum toward increased regulation of GoF...is there?
Another implication of lab leak being true. There are individuals at the CDC and elsewhere in the federal government - not to mention big pharma and biotech companies - who have a material financial stake in GoF research, who have advocated for it, and who are now among those we have given the responsibility for policy prescriptions as well as for identifying the source of the pandemic itself(!) This is like asking the cat to give us a ruling on the case of the missing canary.
I *guess* we could all just recognize the rampant conflict of interest without getting to the final answer, but if the lab leak turns out to be proven true, it would shine a spotlight on all the words and actions taken by people like Dr Fauci (who - instead of recusing himself from making judgments on the virus's source due to his financial stake in GoF companies - wasn't just an early poopooer of lab leak, he was a principle author of the epistemic closure that pushed this hypothesis underground into the conspiracy theory basement for over a year) and - I would hope - cause a public re-assessment of the perverse incentives at work, and of the standards of independence we should expect from people who lead and staff those agencies. Getting this right and raising our standards for leadership could possibly prevent the next pandemic. I'd so those are huge policy stakes.
And not for nothing - looking back to 14-15 months ago - if we had known immediately that this thing came from a lab, don't you think it's possible the lab's records would have helped inform scientists on how to beat the virus? Maybe, maybe not...
It’s true that Cotton was treated unfairly by the MSM and undoubtedly no one was happier about that than him. You make good points that people shouldn’t be attacked for saying something they didn’t say. All that being said, the lab theory I am currently considering is that Tom Cotton was created in a lab experiment as the perfect GOP presidential candidate (heartland upbringing, Ivy League education, war vet) but the guys assembling him went to lunch before inserting the charisma/personality chip and then forgot about it. Poor guy.
Hi Matt and everyone, I'm commenting here hoping you will see this. Taiwan is seeing a huge spike in COVID. They desperately need vaccines. However, like the beginning of the Indian covid crisis, the Biden administration is extremely slow and indifferent to them. Yesterday, the head of AIT said Taiwan will not be prioritized for US extra vaccine donations. This has left Taiwanese extremely bad taste as they elected a complete pro-US and anti-China president and have compromised a lot on trade, e.g. US pork. Even from a complete selfish point of view, letting Taiwan drift towards China will destroy our semiconductor manufacturing capability (TSMC). Biden said no political consideration for vaccines. I get that. But this is very poorly thought out. Taiwan needs us now. Please share this message on twitter if possible. Everyone was saying Taiwan is a country but people barely know this. Thank you!
Hi Frank! I live in Kenya and try to raise the issue of getting the rest of the world vaccinated in this comments section whenever I find an opening. I looked at the graph that comes up on Google when you search "Taiwan covid" and it looks like Taiwan has only had double digit daily case counts a couple of times since 2020 April 6, but now it is seeing a serious spike by comparison (the shape of the graph looks similar to the spike that Kenya faced during March). Do you know if something changed at the start of May? Taiwan was definitely one of the biggest Covid success stories for a very long time.
(Sorry for posting twice, I had a typo the first time and there's no edit button.)
As a trained molecular biologist and someone with active experience in viral directed-evolution, I find the quality of the discourse on this subject to be extraordinarily bad. It is probably foolish to expect more but the scientific ideas floating around twitter and this comment section are often completely off the mark. Unless there is access to lab records, there will not be a smoking gun. But the circumstantial evidence is there. Simply put, the lab in Wuhan was engaged in research with the precise aim of generating something like SARS-CoV-2. The approaches to engineer such a variant or drive laboratory directed-evolution of such variants are straightforward for scientists well versed in the field. If such work were going on, all that would have to happen is a failure of safety protocols for an escape to happen.
Twitter is bad
It's great that Matt already agreed with concerns around gain of function research. Most people in this country don't know anything about it though, and a big part of that is that the lab leak hypothesis wasn't being taken seriously and explored in the media and political discourse (outside of Cotton and a few China hawks, while ignored by the President himself). If we want to effect policy change around gain of function research and safety, we have to make it salient to a broad community, and it becomes more salient if the lab leak hypothesis is seen s credible. So when Matt says nothing changes if the lab leak is true, I think that is just patently false and flies in the face with his usual intuition about political salience and the art of the possible.
"I think it’s increasingly clear that this was a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing, and there is in fact a serious scientific question as to where the virus came from — a question that we will probably never be able to answer because the Chinese government has clearly committed to one viewpoint on this and isn’t going to allow a thorough investigation."
Dude, I got things to do, however, I will put this to you and come back later:
1) the SARS viral lineage is present in a particular species of microbats that has a range over south eastern asia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rhinolophus_affinis_area.png
(The entire group averages tee-tiny with a weight range of 4-28 grams.)
2) That particular species (intermediate horseshoe bats), had been previously tested prior to all this and had been found to be harboring many different variants of the SARS lineage (so there are a great many versions which have NOT infected humans).
3) So, there is every reason to believe the SARS family, including the ancestral version of the Covid virus, originated in bats. Full stop.
4) The lady in charge of the Wuhan biolab said last that they have a sample from 2013, that was immediately ancestrally related to Covid-19, differing by about 20% of the genetic code. I have zero reason to disbelieve her.
5) The genetic testing of Covid-19 indicates signs that the ancestral lineage of the virus was present in civets at some point. And that is all we have got on that.
6) Sewage samples collected in France and Italy in 2019 for unrelated reasons were found to have a version of Covid-19 present. Those samples were from September-November 2019. That indicates that a version of Covid-19 was spreading worldwide BEFORE November 2019.
7) If there was a lab leak it was before all the suspicious dates cited in the media.
8) The initial spread from the point of origin of the particular flavor of Covid-19 that was the main source at the beginning of the epidemic in January would have to have had occurred via people traveling in airplanes. The key point here is that throughout 2019 there would have been a lot of passenger air travel between Wuhan and the US/Europe, but there ALSO would have been a lot of flights going back to Wuhan from the US/Europe.
9) If a lab leak occurred, it is extremely unlikely (almost certain) no one in the lab would have none or noticed this had occurred. In the movies, if a virus leak occurs, lot of alarms go off and red lights start flashing, and that is approximately 100% bullshit. All it would take to kick off the spread of a virus, is a masked up lab worked leaving the wrong vent open when working with the virus, and managed to circulate it in the the air of the room for someone to get infected.
No one, including the specific lab workers involved, would KNOW that they had allowed an infectious virus to spread into the room they were working in. They would not they know if one of them had gotten infected when they went home from work, clean room or no clean room. That's why these things are called accidents.
Worse, it wouldn't need to be the version that eventually spawned the epidemic, it could be an early version that once it started spreading, also started mutating. Eventually it would come up as the version that spawned the epidemic. (Note: it doesn't have to mutate like that, but it can, and we know it DID.)
10) Unless the lab, and the city the lab is in, and lots and lots of the surrounding countryside were collecting biosamples, then they have no idea of how the virus developed from the 2013 version to the current version.
11) Unless the CCP specifically bio-engineered the specific version (or the near-specific version) that turned into the epidemic, they have no fucking idea where the goddamn thing came, or if there even was a lab accident.
They do not know, they have no way to check to see if it did, and! They. Will. Never. Know. How. That. Happened. Or. Even. If. It. Did.
And neither does anyone else involved, or biology/medical types from outside China who weren't involved.
12) And that's that.
elm
gotta go
One thing that has become gradually more clear in the last months, and something the article does not address, is that people in the virology/biomedical community have not communicated clearly what they believe. I was stunned to read Bakers article. I was also stunned by the Baltimore quote in Wade's. Here is an eminent virologist saying on the record that when he first saw the virus sequence (Jan-Feb of 2020?) he thought it was a `smoking gun'! I cannot believe that his reaction is so different from other virologists (many of whom are his academic descendants). Yet no-one communicates this for a year! I am stunned that people with clear conflicts of interest have been allowed to be the public face of the scientific community on this unchallenged. Why does the Science letter (calling for more investigation) appear now and not a year ago? If what is says represents the views of the community, then their views have been misrepresented for a year. If that happens, then it is their responsibility to correct. If they don't, then it starts to look like they are not actually looking for a real investigation.
It wouldn't surprise me if they weren't afraid to speak up. Those that question the dominate narrative can have their career's ruined.
I don't think it is that simple. I think it is a situation where the senior people in the field who would normally speak up are used to choosing their words very carefully, and the communication with the public has been somewhat opportunistically hijacked by a few twitter savvy individuals. The Science letter is a (long overdue) pushback against it.
I agree. Scientists are accustomed to drawing conclusions based on data. Some of the approaches being used by the Wuhan lab could generate SARS-CoV-2 type variants that could be indistinguishable from a virus that evolved naturally – ie directed evolution. Other more hypothesis-driven approaches will be more evident but if done well won’t provide conclusive evidence. Only lab records will provide the answers and, in some scenarios, even that won’t be definitive. A group of highly credentialed scientist calling for a serious investigation (Science May 14) tells all you need to know about the possibility that it is a lab leak.
Excellent piece. Fascinating to see the evolution of reporting on Cotton's comments. Makes a nice contrast with the non-evolution of SARS-CoV-2 described by Alina Chan (Great link).
And about Chan - it may be worth keeping in mind that Chinese virologists *MAY* have their own political axes to grind with respect to the Chinese government.
For example, you link to a now-on-hold PolitFact piece from Sept 2020 as a good example of "the “fact check” complex... taking an increasingly hard line against laboratory origin theories that it claimed had been debunked by scientists."
Fair enough. But that FactCheck was of a Tucker Carlson interview with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, described as "a virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong". On Tucker's show:
"The virus’ genome, she said, indicates that it was modified. She accused the Chinese Communist Party of silencing those who claim otherwise."
Might be science, might be non-American politics. Her science has been criticized, and I'm not attempting to judge it.
Alex Ward at Vox also discounted her, noting criticism of her specific paper while acknowledging that a lab leak of a non-manipulated virus was still on the table.
With Tucker Carlson and the many other click-baiting headline hunters looking for the most provocative story, the Discourse Police have a hard time preserving space for a sensible conversation. Maybe there's a Gresham's Law for Twitter debate - bad speech drives out good.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200919003644/https://www.vox.com/2020/9/18/21439865/coronavirus-china-study-bannon
"My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading."
I strongly agree with this. I have a lot of opinions that I don't share widely because I know they'd be poorly received (and/or taken in bad faith). I might express these one-on-one, but would be very disinclined to do so to an audience, or in a recorded medium.
I also think this is a partial cause of the "voters are more complex than we tend to think" - that the *average* opinion on something isn't necessarily what most people think, but is often a triangulation between a lot of more-extreme idiosyncratic thoughts.
Just curious: many mentions here of Tom Cotton being factually wrong in the past; examples? I genuinely don't know, not being snarky. I read about the Ranger story which . . . ok, I guess? The only other thing I remember well is his piece for the NY Times last summer.
In that instance, he stated an opinion that a majority of Americans also appeared to hold. For my money (literally, at the time), the NY Times needs to contend with such an opinion. Whether they want to be the Paper of Record or help lead the Resistance; either way, it serves you well to contend with majority opinion, I think.
I thought the way they handled that was badly wrong. Now they appear to think the opinion of most Americans cannot be published, because there's too much risk. That's bad; people didn't stop having the opinion. That wasn't persuasion.
These are the Cotton incidents with which I'm aware, genuinely. Right now, it's beginning to look like our media (over here on the left) is trying to gift him the Republican nomination in 2024. But again, I really am curious (no snark!) about the anti-fact escapades of Cotton. Because we will absolutely have to contend with this guy going forward.
Agree with all of this. I'm not sure I can think of instances that show me Tom Cotton egregiously lies, embellishes, or makes bad faith arguments more often than a run of the mill R or D politician. But the three things I know about Tom Cotton are this, the NY opinion piece you reference, and the piece he wrote about why he wouldn't vote against certifying the election.
Oh and the Ranger thing I saw in this thread, but I agree.... pretty small potatoes there.
There's one thing to be learned from this of which we can be certain. With few exceptions journalism devoted to scientific issues sucks badly. One of those exceptions happens to be Julia Belluz. That lady knows what a null hypothesis is and what a test of significance means. On the other hand most journalists don't know what any of this jargon means. They don't know who is expert or who isn't. They know who will take their calls. They don't really know what questions to even ask or whether or not what they are hearing is bullshit. Scientists very rarely speak in certainties. Which is why, when you read a piece of journalism that begins with the phrase "A new study shows...." and you look at the actual study you find it did no such thing. At best the thing claimed to have been shown is cited as a possible interpretation of the data.
I imagine if the Bad Orange Man (and yes he was really really bad) and the GOP had gone full lockdown authoritarian when covid broke out, we’d be on an alternate timeline where the left would have been screaming “open up” and “masks don’t work!” and the entire tribal discourse would have been 100% reversed.
So, the only antivaxxer close relative of mine is a cousin back home in Europe. He’s so left-wing he thinks Merkel is a Nazi, yet he also shares articles on Facebook about how awesome Ron DeSantis is. (He has been to the US only once as a tourist years ago.)