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Comment by rajin444 | Hacker News Reader

> Furthermore, very few of them seem to even have a PhD in their respective fields, nor any significant institutional affiliations.

I see this as a sign that they're more trustworthy. This is a poor situation to be in and not really something we can productively argue about.

Trust should be the most important priority for any scientist (or any person really, but that's another issue).

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You seem to be making a really broad claim with a hidden assumption. When you claim that "Trust should be the most important priority for any scientist," whose trust should be prioritized?

The truth should be prioritized. That's a very simple statement with a ton of complexities behind it and no good solution, I think.

Those complexities seem to be central to how you view graduate degree holders as less trustworthy. From what I understand, you're stating that these institutions are not trustworthy for some reason, which seems to be that they are trying to hide something that is true. Could you elaborate on that?

More or less comes down to trust in institutions and whether or not you think trust should be earned not given. I've seen (personally and in the news) way too many occurrences of trust being abused by institutions. My default is the more political an issue is, the more likely I am to have 0 trust.

I've got a much higher relative trust in underwater basketweaving PHD's than virologist PHD's commenting on the lab leak.

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