Bolding mine. You are promoting bad scientific practice. You might do this, but no, I don’t do this. I get paid to sniff out bullshit science. If I just listened to people I agreed with or judged confidence, I’d be forced into a new line of work.
Look at the methods and analysis, not the name. If you’re so ignorant about a topic that all you can do is look at credentials, you have no business participating in the conversation. If two people come to me with different algorithms for integrating intermittent renewables into the electrical grid, something I’m not equipped to evaluate, then I simply have nothing to contribute. The credentials of the two engineers don’t play into it.
If the OP is questioning something Bill Gates has said, then let’s see it and evaluate it.
The production of knowledge is not done with consideration of the person. It doesn’t matter who does the research: it’s the methods and analysis. But that’s not what Bill Gates is doing. He’s not being a scientist.
When you’re talking about the conveyance of information, it DOES matter whether the person conveying it has expertise. You’re relying on that person to synthesize information from disparate sources. It’s not a matter of analyzing a single data point or the logical construction of the argument. Gates has experience synthesizing information from the field of epidemiology. That’s what is wanted in a talking head on CNN. It doesn’t matter that he’s Bill Gates specifically, but it does matter that he is a person with expertise in this area.
He also seems to be pretty expert at determining who to give the money to. That presupposes some knowledge of the problems to be solved and how much promise there is in various suggested approaches to the problems.
No, I’m not. Maybe you are. Television talking heads don’t come with citations, much to their detriment. So relying on them for anything other than a “that’s interesting” starting point is of little utility.
Again, does anyone have questions about anything, specifically, that he’s said?
Oh jeez, WebEx is one of the worse POS software I’ve used in years. We have to use it for our online trainings and it’s always been annoying. We just had a group meeting in Teams and it worked really well! So I’m actually a big fan - especially switching to it from Skype for Business.
I actually think Teams is going to be very successful, especially since concerns about Zoom’s security have been popping up.
I really think you have an unrealistic attitude about how society communicates. It is impractically inefficient to expect every man, woman, and child in the USA to sit down with primary data and assess it critically. Kids in particular have difficulty with some of the more technical pieces.
Also, the news exists. Would you rather they NOT have anyone speaking to the issue? Or just the journalists?
Or perhaps it is easier to write off the vast majority of those inferior people who must rely on such things as pundits on CNN? Good job: having been written off and dismissed, they will now draw their own conclusions and merrily go out and spread the virus in your community, coughing slogans about freedom.
You’re the one writing them off; I think they can do better and should be encouraged and educated to do so. Television news is primarily an entertainment platform to serve ads. Again, that’s fine as a starting point. But if two supposed experts are giving conflicting information, the solution is not a credential dick-measuring contest. Again, if the OP wants help understanding specific things being said, let’s see them so we can help.
Where has the OP expressed a desire for help understanding specific things being said? Where has there been an example of two supposed experts giving conflicting information? Not in the OP, unless I’ve missed something.
I just tried to have a meeting using Teams, since one of the people uses it in his work. Neither I nor the other person supposedly calling in could get on. My daughter uses it for work, and thinks it is crap.
WebEx has always been fine for me.
Maybe Teams version 3 will work.
But you can’t blame Gates for it, so I’m not sure of its relevance.
Anyone who says “don’t trust any media, decide for yourself” is encouraging anti-intellectualism. Because if you distrust every expert on TV, and try to “decide for yourself,” you invariably end up interpreting information according to your pre-existing biases. That’s why some people go out of the way to discredit mainstream media.
This. I’ ve been extensively watching and reading information on the pandemic from the beginning and I can count the number of people with good journalistic skills on 1 finger.
I’m talking about a single person. The questions he asked clearly showed he had prepared for the interview. They were not scripted because the questions were based on the answers given and they were damn good questions. I learned more in 30 minutes than in all the weeks prior.
And I’m not even sure who the interviewer was. It was late at night and I couldn’t sleep. It took me 10 minutes to realize what was going on and grab a pen to take notes. It was that informative.
As for Bill Gates, he was the head of one of the most successful software companies in history. He didn’t write the software, he hired the people who hired the people to write the software. His job was to steer it in the right direction. His philanthropic ventures are based on results and not just writing checks. By default, his skills are based on learning what needs to be done and then doing it in the most efficient manner. If he speaks on a topic he’s working on professionally then his opinion is based on his leadership skills dealing with the people doing the work.
This is nonsense. first off you’re using absolutism in an argument. Nobody suggested a distrust of every expert on TV. “Intellectualism” as you call it is the validation of what someone says. I learned to question everything I hear from what I thought was a throw-away class in college. It was a course in journalism. It was the best course I ever took bar none. It taught critical thinking and how to validate and question information. The teacher randomly took any newspaper and showed us glaring errors that the readers would miss because they didn’t question what they were reading.
I can give real life examples of how I applied what I learned from that course. if I blindly listened to the specialist doctor treating me I would have lost my leg. He had me go through a number of diagnostic tests which in hindsight were to validate his opinion. By using basic research I was able to bypass the specialist and get my family doctor to do a different test which she scheduled the same day I called her. I was in the hospital the next day and multiple doctors told me I was a day away from losing my leg. Do I have a medical degree? No. Can I validate what I hear? Yes.
I could write a book on how that journalism course changed my life. You shouldn’t trust or distrust information you hear from “experts”. You should validate it using quantifiable methods and understand and be able to recognize agenda-driven information.