Shermer and Bhattacharya discuss: his blacklisting on Twitter in response to his calling COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” • loss of trust in medical and scientific institutions • what went right and wrong with the COVID-19 pandemic • the cost to the economy and education • the Precautionary Principle • Which countries and states did better or worse? • Lab Leak hypothesis vs. Zoonomic hypothesis • RFK, Jr. and conspiracy theories • debating anti-vaxxers •…
Shermer and Christakis discuss: the replication crisis in social science and medicine • determining causality: how we know smoking causes cancer and HIV causes AIDS, but vaccines do not cause autism and cell phones do not cause cancer • randomized controlled trials and why they can’t be done to answer many medical questions • natural experiments and the comparative method of testing hypotheses (e.g., comparing different countries differing responses to Covid-19) • the hindsight bias and the curse of knowledge…
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