We are bombarded everyday by messaging designed to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we buy plastic stuff we don’t need. Our attention is the scarcest of resources and so saturated we often react with numb indifference to all messages alike, just to breathe. The frustration of the academic suffering a full inbox is quite understandable. But to limit a public conversation amongst scientists about a pandemic that nobody knows enough about to be able to sift the wheat from the chaff is disabling. If you have to move, please take me with you.
I have found great cognitive comfort following the public conversations on this mailing list, especially given the dearth of information, lack of transparency, and total absence of scientific debate going on in the public realm here in the UK and, by the looks of things, I suspect, in the US too. The position fed to us here is “scientists disagree, so just do as you’re told”. Anyone knowing what a scientific disagreement actually looks like is well aware that this is cheap propaganda designed to prevent people from questioning what they’re being asked to do. I have been researching and teaching how the behavioural insights team and its previous incarnations work for a long time, I don’t feel safe knowing the level of influence they have on the policies of the current government. Their reasoning is based on a trial-and-error approach that is not viable in our situation.
I can resort to other languages and other countries’ media to learn about what scientists are discovering in a global effort. But that leaves me in the dark as to what is happening on the ground where I live, here in the UK. We must re-appropriate our data, share it, question how it is turned into information and how that information is interpreted.
Thank you Radstats!
Arianna
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