re: Amateur internet sleuths broke the Wuhan lab story. This is how they did it.

That's nonsense. This wasn't a secret ever. Trump was telling everyone this last year.

For the most part, we no longer have a national media. We have influencers.

The death of expertise is a real problem and this won't help. But the "experts" can blame only themselves.

It's not just scientific "experts". The battle has become us (largely elites, largely leftists) against everyone else. I think this dichotomy explains quite a lot, in a lot of fields. Consider the sports journalists who wanted to shut down seasons (and put their jobs in jeopardy!) by being COVID extremists. These are people who cater to a crowd that is predominately male and predominately conservative. So why do they loathe the people who they need to serve and why are they trying to shut down the game that pays their bills? Because COVID was divider of us and them - of smart people and dumb, urban and rural, etc. It was a way to mark out your superiority as an expert, a professional, not a dumb consumer. Obviously this applies to all journalism on pretty much any subject, I'm using sports journalism because it was one of the most bizarre examples.

As for true "experts" - meaning those in hard sciences and with the requisite credentials, the same applies. If this article is correct, then hive-mind controlled the entire US medical/scientific establishment for months during one of the most insane periods of US history. A handful of folks who probably suspected the truth but needed to avoid the truth were able to build consensus that misled 300m people, all of academia, all of the tech industry, our government, our media, etc.

I think it's obvious most of them weren't "in" on it - they just went along with "us" (fellow scientists) because "them" are stupid, unrefined, lesser-than, etc. and we can't give credence to anything they're saying because it risks empowering the ideas of the unwashed (even if they have merit). Surprise, surprise, when the peer pressure let off and a few brave souls started swimming the other direction, it suddenly became ok to recognize what was already there. And when that happened, the "follow the science" media suddenly decided it was ok to look into this stuff.

We're really in uncharted territory as a society/culture. I think people look at the Holocaust (no I'm not comparing this substantively to the Holocaust) and go "well with the advancements and technology, nobody could be led to ignore what was happening or believe it wasn't." But with all of our science and tech, this incident has the potential to show just how vulnerable we are to political, pride and identity based groupthink even in the age of the expert.

TBH I couldn't tell if that was sarcastic or serious. For example, we often pejoratively use "right thinking" to discuss how the culture punishes "wrongthink".

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The death of expertise is a real problem and this won't help. But the "experts" can blame only themselves.

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It isn't so much "the death of expertise". It is the twisted love triangle of Experts/Politics/Media. We have gotten to where too much of our country's research is solely reliant upon government funding. Thst makes those doing to research beholden to the government. The media is too quick to let their agenda guide them, as opposed to the actual Science provided by those experts. This trend became quite obvious and worrisome when media outlets started publishing non-peer-reviewed Covid studies as unquestioned fact instead of letting the Scientific Process actually play out. Add to that a government with a vested interest for certain facts to be true, a scientific community reliant upon that government, and a media all too willing to pick a political side, and you get the mess we are in.

"China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!"

-Donald Trump
January 20th 2020

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They all sat there on their Zoom calls, or six feet apart in person, and gobbled up the info fed to them, then printed it without question. They all seemed content to ignore the obvious discrepancies and clear signs that these people didn't have a fricking clue, probably out of fear of being cut out of the loop. That is not their job. That is not what they are meant to be.

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Matt Taibbi was on Jimmy Dore yesterday. He said basically that journalists aren't experts on anything so they have to rely on sauces. Trouble is they took their sauces at face value instead of doing their homework and questioning whether the sauces might have an ulterior motive.

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I just don’t understand this.

There’s no young hungry journalist out there willing to break a unprecedented story to make a name? Are they all that willing to follow the narrative from the top? Or is there work suppressed if it doesn’t fit the narrative?

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They value life more than a Pulitzer.

His name was Seth Rich. The deep state murdered him.

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A handful of folks who probably suspected the truth but needed to avoid the truth were able to build consensus that misled 300m people, all of academia, all of the tech industry, our government, our media, etc.

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I have had this discussion recently and believe that one of our fundamental differences in politics is that the current generation of younger liberals appear to generally be unquestioning, or at the very least naive.

For example, if a politician tells us that we need to save the planet by buying carbon credits, the left agrees full-bore because who wouldn't want to save the planet, while the right is immediately suspicious of a scam.

The left therefore concludes that the right must be evil, doesn't care about the earth or anyone on it, and is probably racist. I'm not sure there is ever a realization that it might not simply be a good idea, that they're not getting the whole truth, or that politicians/governments can lie and manipulate for personal gain.

Historically the media has served to lessen this divide through research and investigation, providing both sides of the argument for consideration. However, their current replication of one-sided political talking points and the echo-chambers in social media instead further it, making it almost impossible to reach common ground.

As in this case, the ones who were mislead believed everything that was being fed to them, and assumed that any dissension was coming from a terrible, racist place (especially if Trump was involved), because that is simply what they were told.

They were so busy virtue-signalling and condemning the other side for having a conservative viewpoint, they never thought to ask if what they were being told was actually true.