[mike_hearn]

I'm not going to get into the weeds about COVID because you said:

> the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena ... Consensus was overwhelmingly on one side ... [those who disagree] jeopardize their license

Rephrased, it's not happening and it's good that it's happening.

Pick your side: either you want agreement in the healthcare system to be trusted because it's the result of many independent decisions pointing in the same direction, or you want a system that punishes dissent. You can't try to claim the benefits of the first whilst cheering on the second.

[sorcerer-mar]

Wait wait, can you tell me what was actually inside the [ ellipsis ] that you substituted out?

Arguing in bad faith is one thing, but I suspect you might even be tricking yourself!

[mike_hearn]

You're claiming healthcare advice is an emergent phenomenon and also agreeing that people who spread "verifiably false" misinformation lost their license - a totally non-emergent phenomenon. I get that your faith in authority is so strong you don't really believe there were any mistakes made there, and thus that the people who were fired for opposing public health mandates weren't really part of the healthcare system at all in some sense. But they were a part of it, and mistakes were made by public health officials, many of which they later admitted to.

Again: pick your side. Advice motivated by career-ending penalties for non-compliance cannot be said to be an emergent phenomenon.

[sorcerer-mar]

How many licensure boards are there in the US? Roughly 60.

How many allow their doctors to relay verifiably false medical information with their patients? Roughly zero.

Is this because there's some big conspiracy of all 60 licensure boards getting together to suppress information, or is it because each of them has independently reached the self-evident conclusion that licensees spreading false information destroys the credibility of the profession?

Emergent phenomena, amigo.

[mike_hearn]

You seem to be under the impression there were no conspiracies during COVID, which is nonsense. You can read the Slack logs of the channels where conspiracies were organized (e.g. the papers denying lab leaks were organized that way). You can read emails where people were given their top-down orders. You can read meeting notes and journal reviews where people say that whilst claim X is true it would cause people to stop following government orders so it should be suppressed. You can read interviews with public health officials who say they organized conspiracies to lying, and you can observe that the entire medical profession went along with that. The synchronized flipflops on masks alone was enough to destroy many people's belief in doctors and public health.

By all means, try and wordsmith your way out of these facts. It doesn't work. Trust in the medical profession has dropped through the floor, and it will keep falling further for as long as responses like yours are common in discussions of it.

As for your 60 number, those are mostly state level boards, who have a monopoly over licensing in that state. If a doctor gets struck off in a state they could move to another, lose all their customers and home, and try to start again, but in practice those boards don't approve doctors who were struck off in another state regardless of reason. So in reality it's not much different to having one. The wider argument is of course silly, akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships because all decisions are emergent phenomena arising from the wisdom of the crowds.

[sorcerer-mar]

> You seem to be under the impression there were no conspiracies during COVID, which is nonsense.

You seem to be continuing to put words into other people's mouths.

> You can read emails where people were given their top-down orders.

This is literally not true (I've read the emails)

> The synchronized flipflops on masks alone was enough to destroy many people's belief in doctors and public health.

One man's "synchronized flipflop" is another's "appearance of new evidence and tradeoffs."

> You can read meeting notes and journal reviews where people say that whilst claim X is true it would cause people to stop following government orders so it should be suppressed.

Can you link me to this?

> You can read interviews with public health officials who say they organized conspiracies to lying

Can you link me to this?

> akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships

No, it's like arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision, it doesn't mean they are acting in coordination with one another. Which is obviously true.

All I see in this thread is someone confidently asserting that he needs to be trusted with the truth despite reflexively dismissing data that doesn't fit his priors and, apparently, believing that it's unreasonable to assume that being physically closer to a person with a respiratory virus produces a higher risk of infection than standing further away. (I find that you're never far from truly insane opinions in convos with these "just a skeptic" types)

You have done a fine job of demonstrating the loss of trust in the profession though, I'll give you that! It is almost entirely (not entirely, but almost entirely) due to people who have simply decided to be confidently wrong and, when asked for examples or sources over and over and over again, fail to produce them.

You obviously have a right to form your own opinion on all of this stuff, but demonstrably don't have the capability to do it. Many such cases!