Oh boy. And just as they were going to kick off infrastructure week.
Again, what kind of a “fecal presentation” is the Trump Administration, sheesh. It’s not an ambassador’s job to say things like that about the government/politics of a trusted ally.
If you are right, I expect GOP-selected SCOTUS will make this illegal at some point.
Trump Administration’s real allies in Germany have been out of power since 1945 up till now.
Most of the history of economics appears to be trying persuade counter-intuitive results to an incredulous audience, who appear quite happy to forget everything they’ve learned over the last so many hundred years and go back to easy economic fallacies (“lump-of-labour”, or “a country’s finances are like a household’s”, or “tariffs inflict pain on other people”) that we had to fight so hard to get rid of in the first place.
If I’m Merkel, I’m expelling the ambassador before breakfast.
The best ambassadors, and cabinet members and judges too!
I’m worried that there is a general trend of devaluing expertise and glorifying “going with your gut”. It seems that more and more people think that the world really is simple, and see all warnings from subject matter experts as so much arrogance and “talking down”.
I suppose that any message coming from people who are seen as opponents in the culture war will get dismissed as nonsense.
Part of that is because experts have been shown, often enough, to be flat out wrong about alot of stuff, or contradict themselves or each other. One obvious example here is diet and nutrition. There’s so much info out there from reputable doctors both supporting and countering the official diet recommendations, that is is hard to take any of them seriously.
Plus alot of experts come across as patronising and sneering.
The solution imho is not to denigrate experts so completely as seems to be happening.
The solution is to take responsibility for your learning, and evaluate experts, and test things out for yourself.
It requires a mental shift to take responsbility for your own choices and consequences, which is hard. It’s much easier to have a dialogue/monologue along the following lines:
Dr X says follow a balanced diet, which I have done, but I am still fat. When i raised this with her, she very strongly insinuated that the fault was with me, and that I was lying about following her recommendations. However I did follow them, and have the diary to prove it. Plus I have noticed Dr X is her/himself a bit pudgy. Therefore, fuck Dr X.
And then, by extension,
fuck all the doctors.
Ideally, the monologue would be:
I’ve followed Dr X’x recommendations, they didn’t work, and s/he is him/herself rather pudgy, so logically s/he doesn’t follow his/her own reocmmendations, or they just don’t work. Right, in that case, who do i know who used to be fat, and isn’t anymore? Oh yeah, Sean the local body builder guy. Let me have a chat with him.
leads to, hopefully, asking the right questions, and listening to the answers, and filtering them to make some sort of workable sense.
Example question would be:
Why am I fat?
Why am I out of a job or poor or feeling threatened? Hannity has your answer, tonight at 7!
I also think some of it is due to an anti-science bent in modern discourse. We make so many ideological judgments based on consistency that if experts try to say “our understanding of X has changed because we have more complete information,” people say “Oh, these experts can’t keep their stories straight, and therefore they are unreliable.”
And it’s compounded by the fact that there’s always an opportunist in there somewhere, saying something like “Weight loss experts are always changing their minds about what’s good or bad for you. MY proven method has been the same for decades, buy it now.”
Apply the same thing to any field or facet of life, and we get to where we are now, where many have decided that a silver-spoon-fed coastal elite who doesn’t understand how the government works is somehow the most qualified person to run it.
An informed opinion can certainly be wrong. But one would hope that the person in question (being an expert) would have a better chance at a) realizing they were mistaken and b) knowing how to correct the mistake. Doesn’t always work that way, ofc ¯_(ツ)_/¯
And yet, of course, they’re typing these thoughts on a device which is the culmination of decades’ effort by some of the greatest and most highly-trained engineering minds in history (plus Woz, who was apparently born soldering transistors together).
It doesn’t help the popular media is absolutely terrible at reporting information that requires a great deal of nuance. The amount of times a news report overstates, or even states the opposite of a health or diet study’s actual conclusion, is staggering.
It also doesn’t help that legit sites might have paywalls while the ones that just make shit up and push propaganda largely don’t.
That’s a good point. Quality has a price but you can get shit for free!
That’s a really good observation – I hadn’t considered that until now.
I’ve been thinking about this for a bit lately because I hit paywalls at the middle or end of the month. Then I start searching for the topic on other sites and some of them are just taking from the original article and others summarize it… too much and then their are the others that twist it to whatever they want.
If someone isn’t willing to pay or isn’t accepting our kind of screwed up way of trying to get people to pay, they’re accessing just whatever they come across or what is being pushed on social media.
Meanwhile the journalists are erecting paywalls so they get, well paid and are being held to such high standards that they are pounced on when they are even slightly incorrect. It’s just not… a good system we have right now.
Sometimes it takes me an hour or so to chase down a source, because I just question what they are using for data. And I don’t and can’t do that for everything.
Most people don’t really have the time or inclination to do that for ANYTHING. I find it very worrisome just how far social and commercial dynamics can lead people away from verifiable reality. It seems you really have to fight to know anything in the modern information ecosystem.
I gotta say that I’m super grateful to the Amazon-WaPo merger for getting me a year of WaPo online for super cheap and keeping the monthly rate low ever since. TBH, it’s one of the best $3 or whatever i spend each month.