Applied science. Did you read it?
> for a virus that has killed a quarter-million people in the US
Contributed to their deaths, sure. But not as much as the lockdown and war (still cultural for now, thankfully) will have contributed to the death of science.
2: it’s the literal cause of their death. Don’t know what you’re getting at with trying to compare that to how much science is dying. Sounds like incomparable quantities to me - be the good scientist you want to see in this world!
Are you sure about that? Last I heard (from Dr. Birx on TV), many states count anyone with a positive test as a “COVID death”, regardless of what the coroner’s report says.
If we counted deaths for any cold the same way, it would be a shocking (perhaps not as big, but still shocking) number.
> be the good scientist you want to see in this world!
Unfortunately there is no place for a good scientist in most fields, you either play the political game or you get frozen out. I would rather fight to tear the whole system down to its foundations, so more people will have the opportunity to be good scientists in the future.
Now try “diabetes and hypertension”, or “lung cancer”, or “temporary immunodeficiency” and you can start to see how dishonest it is to represent the death toll of this disease as a single number, based on an interpretation that generates the largest possible number, and an interpretation not used with any other respiratory disease.
And fascinatingly, you don't worry at all about people who died without test missing from statistics.
> And fascinatingly, you don't worry at all about people who died without test missing from statistics.
Actually “presumed COVID deaths” are included in some states’ numbers, but yes there is some undercounting too.
How are those public health recommendations less applied than vaccine creation (especially mRNA vaccines, which are only possible today due to a ton of basic research in the last 2 decades)?
But even in that field, ludicrously simple and narrow-minded theories that are “tested” by running computer games, and then memory-holed as soon as they are no longer politically useful, are a big part of the problem.
tbh I'm not clear what you mean by a lot of the terms like "memory holed" - do you mean like the work of Bayes or Boole? I love learning about stuff that we learned, then forgot (scurvy, comes to mind).
That model can't always work, however - we also know that people's first impressions will continue to be strongly held for quite a bit of time. EG, once a news story is published, retractions lack the same impact.
What other possible explanations are there? I think it's worth considering alternatives, as it seems clear there are multiple relevant ways of looking at the problem.
Corruption. Individual journalists may not have the active intent to do harm with every editorial decision, but there is no way the pattern of things that are “amplified” or “remembered” vs “forgotten” is an accident.