Fair enough and understood on most of those points. But here's the problem, while for example there was early confusion and division of opinion about masks, the evidence is now definitive that masks reduce transmission vectors. Part of the early mixed messaging was because of the need to preserve PPE for clinical staff. Particularly in the context of some lack of clear data about the transmission process, siphoning off limited supply in that context looked like a bad idea. In this sense you are correct that there is a certain amount of fluidity to our understanding of what Covid 19 might be, and how best to treat, prevent, and eventually vaccinate against it. And of course that fluidity or at least a portion of it may be intrinsic to any encounter with a novel pathogen. But at the same time, people who are conversant with the literature at some point are entitled to make a judgment that what was previously undecided has now adequate weight of evidence to form a judgment. In other words what was previously contested can now be labeled disinformation. I understand that that is not an easy boundary to control or police. In this context however I would reserve the right to label a post as disinformation if in my professional judgment the weight of evidence is convincingly and strongly against it.
The other issue that would be appreciated is more vigilance about trolling. There are posts that are simply put up to inflame, that are not humorous, and it would be very helpful if you could outline what you see as discriminating criteria for pulling down a post as trolling versus simply a post that may be controversial, sarcastic, or humor. That would be a real service to the form.
One final issue. In science, the arbiter of truth is not the size of your resume,
it's how convincingly you can link an explanatory narrative to the existing body of evidence. So in that sense I disagree with your metaphor about "bigger fish". Or bigger organs of any kind (something men are always concerned about!
). Where resumes and credentials in a sense become important is that they offer a crude measure of how much credibility an opinion about a scientific question
may have. Unfortunately, great resumes do not guarantee great science, and we saw this around the Santa Clara antibody study, where scientists with impressive credentials took classic prohibited shortcuts, and came up with a reputation-damaging and simply invalid result.
But ultimately any 'opinion' has scientific value only if it conforms to and is justified by the weight of evidence. And the word opinion here is tricky and frankly deceptive. I'd like to remind you of what I said earlier, that the scientific method is largely about getting
opinion qua opinion out of the business. In some sense of course scientific theories at an early stage reflect an hypothesis that could be considered at that point just an opinion. But as science progresses and as weight of evidence amasses, that 'opinion', if you want to call it that, transitions into something else. It's no longer simply an 'opinion' it is
a scientifically-supported finding. Those two things (opinions, esp. political and religious ones, and scientifically supported findings) are therefore different classes of assertions. Scientific training (and experience over a long period of time) gives you the ability to understand what constitutes good evidence, marginal evidence, and virtually slamdunk evidence. Okay so much for my epistemology lecture.
What I find extremely troubling in the current climate is the ridiculous notion that scientific questions have a wide range of equally valid opinions, including those from scientists! That's BS, and it's part of the systematic dismantling of expertise, because that expertise might threaten vested interests and their highly questionable assertions.
