Rex Kerr
1 min readAug 24, 2023

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I've frequently encountered contrarians who have trouble with science, despite having the appropriate background to be able to use evidence to constrain our models of reality.

If you think you have a scientific point, don't waste our time with digging through YouTube videos. You could hardly find a better way to waste our time. Videos are hard to search, go by slowly, are good for persuasion and bad for maintaining an objective outlook, etc. etc.. Cite something relevant instead!

If you can't find it and don't know it, guess what? You've not been evaluating the evidence yourself; you've been trusting other people to evaluate the evidence for you. So your credentials are irrelevant.

You can't guesstimate your way to understanding what the risk profile is of Covid vaccines. You need data sets, with known methods, error bars, all the rest. There are a lot of confounds, system isn't stationary, etc. etc.; it's not an easy analysis to do with confidence. But if you're going to make a point that goes past "it's really hard to get accurate estimates of vaccine safety in such a politically charged environment with incredibly strong pressures in both directions to get the 'right answer'", the onus is on you to deliver something convincing.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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