[Genuine Realist]

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/vinay...1475875d0r

Not sure what other thread to put this in, so I made a new one. I like what this blog says, and I think it is important we consider the points it makes.

Bear Bryant once said there were two kinds of bad, uncoachable football players. One doesn't listen to anything you say. The other doesn't do anything but what you say.

No sensible CEO goes with his experts by rote. They're there to assist and advise, to provide information and ideas - not to make decisions. (If they get into the decision making process, then they've become CEOs.) The expertise is immensely valuable - the value judgments that experts make are no better than those of anyone else. And their objectivity can be warped by their immersion in their own field. I value the medical knowledge of the medicos who post here, and seldom comment on them. But their social and political opinions run the whole gamut, and are too often infected by the elitism that is too often a byproduct of higher education.

The science on covid has gone every which way in the last nine months. Fauci is as popular as he is not because he hasn't backtracked a lot. The public trusts him because he is so obviously in good faith, not because he has always been right. Had Trump as President emphasized his own respect for scientific opinion, while emphasizing that the Administration also had to consider other values - damage to the economy, damage to the education of children at large, damage to society at large, even health matters that are relatively inchoate (e.g., mental health issues such as depression, anomie, domestic stress), he would have done fine, even if the scientific opinions did not always lead the list. It was his compulsive personalization and hostility that did him in. 

I also think I'll add one global insight to the compulsive US bashers that populate this board. Whatever the don't-tread-on-me themes in this society that lead to reflexive opposition to authority, the vaccines that might lead us out of this mess have all been produced in the United States (and its recent rival in political oppositionism, the UK) and in a remarkably short period of time. I imagine it's some sort of record. I am wondering what those obedient Germans and docile Taiwanese have been doing all this time.

[Genuine Realist]

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/vinay...1475875d0r

Not sure what other thread to put this in, so I made a new one. I like what this blog says, and I think it is important we consider the points it makes.

Bear Bryant once said there were two kinds of bad, uncoachable football players. One doesn't listen to anything you say. The other doesn't do anything but what you say.

No sensible CEO goes with his experts by rote. They're there to assist and advise, to provide information and ideas - not to make decisions. (If they get into the decision making process, then they've become CEOs.) The expertise is immensely valuable - the value judgments that experts make are no better than those of anyone else. And their objectivity can be warped by their immersion in their own field. I value the medical knowledge of the medicos who post here, and seldom comment on them. But their social and political opinions run the whole gamut, and are too often infected by the elitism that is too often a byproduct of higher education.

The science on covid has gone every which way in the last nine months. Fauci is as popular as he is not because he hasn't backtracked a lot. The public trusts him because he is so obviously in good faith, not because he has always been right. Had Trump as President emphasized his own respect for scientific opinion, while emphasizing that the Administration also had to consider other values - damage to the economy, damage to the education of children at large, damage to society at large, even health matters that are relatively inchoate (e.g., mental health issues such as depression, anomie, domestic stress), he would have done fine, even if the scientific opinions did not always lead the list. It was his compulsive personalization and hostility that did him in. 

I also think I'll add one global insight to the compulsive US bashers that populate this board. Whatever the don't-tread-on-me themes in this society that lead to reflexive opposition to authority, the vaccines that might lead us out of this mess have all been produced in the United States (and its recent rival in political oppositionism, the UK) and in a remarkably short period of time. I imagine it's some sort of record. I am wondering what those obedient Germans and docile Taiwanese have been doing all this time.