We’re publishing an original piece today by regular contributor Dr Sinéad Murphy, an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University, about why it’s a mistake to ask academics for advice about managing the pandemic. She doesn’t base this on the fact that the advice of professors of medicine and public health over the past 18 months has generally been poor, but on the disconnect between life in the academy and the real world. Here is an extract, taking Devi Sridhar’s advice to the Scottish Government as an example:
It is not surprising that the likes of Professor Sridhar run for cover to academia when the going gets tough – insofar as our universities have been institutions of enlightenment, they have long been a refuge for irresponsible opinion and wild theories of every kind, which they absolve of all sin by rendering them as purely academic.
What is surprising is that Sridhar and her like were ever allowed out of academia in the first place, that their ‘expert’ models and theories and forecasts and projections were ever accorded the dignity of relevancy.
Our universities – more is the pity – have evolved as little more than soft-play areas for amoral and impractical thought, for ‘critical’ projects wielded at any target that presents itself. It is a serious category error to assume that anyone employed in them is qualified to pronounce on anything of material significance.
To give him his due, Kant warned against this grave error. He saw that once we were busy submitting everything to ‘but’ questions we would be far too reckless to determine anything of practical or moral significance. “Argue as much as you like about whatever you like,” he encouraged his readers – “but obey!”
Worth reading in full.
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devi sridhar may be an expert – its just that she is an expert in a different subject and nothing to do with the one at hand
Divvy Sriddy is I am sure an expert in FA, tragedy, nonsense and mayhem excepted. I rather suspect her academic qualifications are a sham and were probably paid for by the Clinton’s. She is a US Democrat plant.
I would never, ever accuse her of being blessed with anything remotely close to intelligence.
It’s not a question of the ‘wrong sort’ of expertise. The basics of this are well within the grasp of any intelligent thinker of a ‘critical’ bent. As said – the problem is lack of such in academia – not the basic project of that sphere.
Quite. A DPhil in malnutrition and disease in India has close to SFA to do with the Covid-19 phenomenon. She really should STFU.
She’s pretty. That’s it, the dark skinned equivalent of a dumb blonde..
Egos bigger than their brains.
Feelings of self-righteousness trump self-knowledge.
Ability to convince a key person that what they say is right, is greater than their own inability to convince themselves thatchy may be wrong.
Making demands that everyone be virtuous…….is distinctly lacking in virtue.
I am an expert in something, too. Not this. But something.
‘Experts’ have their place, but the fact is that science requires competing theories and interpretations. The government failed to include the ‘sceptical opposition’ as well as ordinary people in meaningful consultations. So when the ‘experts’ erred, it took ages to modify best practice. In fact it still isnt happening, or ‘experts’ suddenly ‘discover’ sceptical truths and claim to have always held them!
The government also failed to employ even the most basic smell tests to what they were being fed by SAGE, which would have revealed the truth. They were either exceptionally stupid, or lazy, or they didn’t want to know.
Excellent article.
These experts are not being given the cover to speak up. Only those with real conviction of thought have done so. Cancel culture is everywhere and smearing of anyone going against the grain is so instant.
I don’t know if this is some kind of did anybody actually read this tripwire but the “… but obey” (Räsoniert, soviel, wie ihr wollt, aber gehorcht!) quote is from the Prussian king Friedrich II (“the great”).
As to the “I’m just an academic”, you’re just someone who has been complicit in prohibiting me from meeting my parents for two years in a row and I assure you, you haven’t yet felt like a punching bag.
Before my ‘awakening’ I used to think she was a fine looking filly but now I realise she’s an ugly (night)mare.
Essentially, we need to disentangle academia from sponsorship by large self-interested corporations. It influences appointments, areas of research and the results of that research.
Whoever it was, that managed to shut the shameless bitch up, deserves a medal.
I’m not sure that universities shouldn’t be a place for “irresponsible opinion and wild theories of every kind,”.
The problem seems to be that contrary analysis that shows them to be abjectly wrong has become viciously suppressed, and thus they are presented as ‘the consensus’.
The modern day Rasputins
“complete with that air of implicit authority that the BBC continues to confer on its content and contributors.”
Exactly. Yet people who ought to know better keep backing away from the obvious necessary conclusion – delenda est BBC – and clinging to some idea that it serves as some sort of “balance” or it can be reformed. It’s an elite propaganda and manipulation machine. That’s what it was designed to be, that’s what it’s always been, and that’s what it will always be.
How anybody who recognises the harm done by the systematic manipulation of our society into covid panic and mass “vaccination” could still resist that conclusion, I don’t know.
Defund the BBC. Sell it off. In private hands, it’s ultimately just another media corp. It’s the imprimatur of “national broadcaster”, and the inappropriate credibility that flows from that, that makes it especially harmful.
Paul Johnson: “One of the principle lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is — beware intellectuals.
Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.”
Among the balances necessary for the healthy functioning of a society is that between anti-intellectualism and technocracy. The current global order clearly contains far too much respect for the latter, and the former tends to be demonised, where in fact a excess of either is dangerous. In particular Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson clearly lacked any confidence in what might have been a personal inclination to not take “expert” advice as infallible.
Past leaders with more confidence in their own instincts and leadership responsibility, certainly Thatcher and possibly even the execrable Blair along with many of the earlier C20th political leaders, would imo have been more likely to step back and say “hang on, do we really want to go down this radical and hugely costly path merely on the say so of a few specialists with no understanding of the wider picture?”. (Though it seems clear now that the government was packed with neurotic panicking weasels like Gove, Cummings and others, manipulating data and advice to push Johnson in the disastrous direction they wanted.)
“Beware committees, conferences and leagues of intellectuals. Distrust public statements issued from their serried ranks. Discount their verdicts on political leaders and important events.
For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and nonconformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behavior. Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en-masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.
Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.”
The continuation of that quote from Paul Johnson’s 2007 book: Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky
If that isn’t a fine encapsulation of the malign impact of SAGE and the global covid panicker elites, I don’t know what is.
(It’s also, not coincidentally, a fine description of the intellectual drivers of the climate alarmist panic).
I’m not sure where this article is going – except up its own arse.
Forget Kant, and focus on Cant. The problem isn’t ‘critical thinking’ in the true meaning of the term. It’s lack of it, and a consequent resort to ‘authority’ – as justified by this statement :
“…our universities have been institutions of enlightenment, they have long been a refuge for irresponsible opinion and wild theories of every kind”
I’m not voting for crap – but ‘critical thinking’ of the true sort is its own corrective. True application of scientific method is ‘critical thinking’, whilst ‘irresponsible opinion’ and ‘wild theories’ smack of the narrative around ‘misinformation’.
This is a somewhat rosy coloured world-view, ie, in theory, you’re completely right but in practice, you are – insofar my own, limited experience goes – very much off the mark. I can provide another, classic example from the software sector:
In 1954, a guy named John McCarthy implemented the first version of the LISP programming language for an IBM 704 computer. Because he considered it too bothersome to do this with explicit code, he wanted a system for manageing memory allocation and deallocation automatically. He also wanted tail-sharing for linked lists. The obvious idea for doing this is use a counter to remember how many other cons cells refer to a particular cons cell and deallocate it once the count reaches zero. But – unfortunately – most of the bits available in a register of an IBM 704 were already used for something else by the already written code and there’s was no place for this counter. Additionally, he even considered it too bothersome to think about this issue and preferred – at some point in time once they actually started to run out of memory – to offload this to some student who’d then have to find a way to do it.
So it happened. The brilliant idea this student had was based on the observation that all of the memory of the IBM 704 was accessible to the LISP implementation. Hence, once memory ran out, all which needed to be done was to examine the complete memory in order to find cons cells with no pointers to it. These could then be decallocated to make the memory used by them available for other purposes. This is called a so-called tracing garbage collector.
The assumption underlying it, namely, all places where one could possibly store a valid pointer can be examined by the currently running application (the LISP implementation) has been wrong almost everywhere since at least the 1970s. Additionally, tracing garbage collection turned out to be a horribly inefficient way of managing memory both from a space and processing time perspective. That’s why people who are considered among the finest minds in CS by many have spent the last 65 years coming up with ever more complicated implementations of this monstrosity in order to plaster over all obvious deficiencies as they came to be known.
The outcome of this race of the lunatics is still with us and routinely cause costly software failures all over the world everyday. And research in how to implement a working tracing garbage collector is – obviously – still healthy and ongoing.
I liked
“Our universities – more is the pity – have evolved as little more than soft-play areas for amoral and impractical thought”
Who long until Dr Murphy (excellent piece, by the way) gets ‘cancelled’ by her employer following ‘protests’ by leftist colleagues, ‘students’ and activist journalists via (un)social media?
One element in all this that wasn’t mentioned about academic debate on COVID and the responses to it is that many senior acadmeics have taken to grandstanding and posturing to gain power and influence (and possibly wealth) to bully weak politicians into doing as they say, despite most of what they espouse being at best guesses/theories that have yet to be proven correct.
Many of their more junior colleagues either stay silent to keep their jobs/livelihood or because they want to be there to get their opportunity in the same way in the future.
Those brave people that do speak up – including doctors, nurses and scientists, well – we’ve seen first hand what happensa to them – the Establishment controlling their field of expertise along with chums in the media, etc, try to ruin them. Quite often it works.
Political activists like the pompous buffoon Sridhar seem to have no interest in the basics of decision making e.g. cost/benefit analysis.
Also worth bearing in mind that many, if not nearly all, of these academics who keep pushing draconian policies are largely insulated from the consequences of their recommendations. Most have bullet-proof incomes. A majority won’t live alone. And many, and perhaps even a majority, will have private outdoor space at home.
If they all lived alone in flats and had economically-sensitive incomes, I doubt very much they’d be nearly as keen to cripple economic and social activity for so long.
Here’s the answer to the article’s question…
Most people –including scientists, doctors, academics, and other formally educated folks– are rather profoundly perplexed and befuddled by the various absurdities of the Covid crisis (e.g., the back-and-forth shifting of scientific decrees, the censorship of valid data, the presence of toxic graphene oxide nanoparticles in Covid vaccines, etc.). They cannot really make sense out of it all. At best, they can DESCRIBE the absurdities but they cannot explain why it is happening.
Why is that? It is because they lack pieces of vital knowledge, whose lack hinders and disables accurate coherent full understanding (therefore, it impairs the proper decision-making process and the potential for profound constructive action).
Those “missing” pieces of knowledge right in front of our noses are described in a comprehensive article called “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room –The Holocaustal Covid-19 Coronavirus Madness: A Sociological Perspective & Historical Assessment Of The Covid “Phenomenon”” by Rolf Hefti at https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
Without a proper understanding, and full acknowledgment, of the true problem and reality, no real constructive change is possible.
Disconnection, not disconnect (6th line down) PLEASE!
Disconnect is a verb, not a noun.
Devi Sridhar is pure evil. Knowingly encouraging children to be injected with experimental jabs. She will be held to account. ‘Vaccine’, ‘Vaccinated’, ‘Vaccination’ NO. NO. NO. – anyone who tries to jab me, my family and my loved ones with that *monkey gunk* will learn the ultimate lesson. This is the hill I die on: FIGHT. BACK. BETTER. – Updated information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/
When that stupid baggage Susan Michie was considered an “expert” in anything (other than promoting Communism) and was allowed to be on SAGE, we should realise they are all mostly a waste of air.
Pseudo academic…but no COMMON sense
Another excellent piece by Dr Murphy. The clip at the end explains why Johnson (and the rest of his administration,) are so hopeless at higher level thinking. They simply have no background knowledge in anything practical.
Agreed. Reminds me of the difference in industry between the old-guard managers who had worked their way up and the New Management parachuted in from above with no experience just buzzwords.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb called them “intellectual yet idiots”
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577