[simplotek]

> This is a matter that affects every citizen in this country, and the experts lost their credibility a couple of years ago at least.

I don't agree. What we did see is ignorance and completely absurd conspiracy theories taking the center stage while experts were being sidelined or even completely removed from the discussion.

[netmonk]

May be because of the "trust me bro, im a scientist" stance.

[simplotek]

> May be because of the "trust me bro, im a scientist" stance.

Could you please show a single example you feel demonstrates this thing you describe as "trust me bro, im a scientist" stance?

[netmonk]

exactly the top comment of this reply/thread, that's why i wrote such comment on it.

"As someone who was a genetic engineer for a long while, watching HN talk about dodgy papers like this is painful."

Understand: "as a great scientific with long career, i feel depressed to see so much stupidy."

Trying to attract my sympathy for his "painfull feeling", therefore trying to positively bend my opinion in his favor.

"This paper posits a completely crazy cloning strategy that makes no sense (ie doing something far more convoluted than typical bsaI/bsmbi seamless cloning workflows that breaks the whole point of "seamless" workflows), and then tries to use that to make a case for a genomic signature that we could look for. They then look at a handpicked set of viral genomes, but leave a bunch out and duplicate others (I think WIV04 and WHu are the same), and largely seem to be observing without realizing it that yes, recombination occurs among these viral lineages."

Im not a specialist here, but this babbling just suggest me someone unable to think out of the box, restricting all possibles to only what he can master.

"This isn't even getting into the fact that a restriction-ligation based cloning strategy would leave glaringly obvious fingerprints behind in the form of the hundreds of nucleotide differences that are present outside the cutsites across the lineages... it would be blindingly obvious if someone just cut-and-pasted sars-cov-2 from other studied genomes."

"would leave" - "it would" - To me this is legalist wording. A way to suggest something without actually affirming it. cause the dude is not sure at all in fact.

So may be the core idea of his message is scientifically groundede and valid, but the way he expresses it is far more closer to the 'trust me bro' stance than critical neutral scientific phrasing.

[mcphage]

> Im not a specialist here, but this babbling just suggest me someone unable to think out of the box, restricting all possibles to only what he can master.

This is a prime example of Asimov's quote: "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

[netmonk]

Well, at which extent this applies to our current case ? Or is it just a way to look smart, by just citing a famous reference without contextualising to our current issue ?

[mcphage]

Alevskaya talks about their experience as a biologist, and what their take is on this paper. And your response was, “I don’t understand any of that, so there’s probably nothing there to understand”.