| Yeah you're right about nuance and the fact that it's hard to have a nuanced conversation nowadays. For what is worth I'm precisely trying to bring nuance to the discussion about institutions. Institutions do fail. That's a normal mode of their operation. They fail all the time. When institutions fail, they fail and some other institution (in the broadest case the institution of civil society as a whole) calls them out for the bullshit. The question is: what to do next. Should we dismantle that institution and other similar institutions, including the ones that helped provide the data that proved the failed institution wrong just because they are all institutions and guilty of the original sin of being an institution? I find this approach to be a little bit too extreme. Yes. many institutions are full of shit. Let's reward people who can reign them back in. But we need professionals. We cannot all be experts in everything. I know it can feel this way because we have an unprecedented source of information at our fingertips but realistically we cannot all just figure out things on our own. I sure feel I'm super smart and I can figure out everything if I just had a weekend but luckily I grew just wise enough to know foolish and misleading that feeling is. |
I agree that folks should not condemn the messenger. In this context, that seems to mean science as an institution or individual scientists. The lying institutions should be disregard untill they are shown to actually be reformed.