The team’s on vacation, so for this week’s Honestly, we’re sharing a favorite episode from a favorite podcast, one you may not have heard of: UnHerd with Freddie Sayers.
UnHerd’s mission is similar to ours: to push back against the herd mentality, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people, and places.
On this episode, host Freddie Sayers talks to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins about God, people’s distrust in science and vaccines, cancel culture, aliens, romantic poetry and more.
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Per Dawkins, religious beliefs are ridiculous, and at the same time we should blindly follow “the science” when we have no time to validate scientific assumptions (e.g. Covid Vaccine efficacy) because we had no time. I guess there are truly no atheists in foxholes, including Dawkins
Yes, it was really disappointing when it got to the covid stuff and the loss of trust in science and his lack of willingness to recognize the harm that was done by people who should have known better. He almost explicitly endorsed the "we can't tell them the truth" angle that most government authorities took when deciding not to share how little was known about the real effectiveness of the vaccines and how they differed from traditional vaccines. The unprecedented damage done to society by the covid response and the repression of individual freedom is hard to overestimate and he kind of waved it off, "what else could they do?". And the way scientific institutions, including the biggest journals, biased their coverage and sharing of information, silencing as much as possible alternative hypotheses about the origins of the virus, the effectiveness of things like masks as well as vaccines, have done real harm to the future trust that we can place in those institutions. Science is all about being wrong and adapting to new information, but when you refuse to admit it when a hypothesis is wrong and conspire to tear down alternative explanations, that is not excusable.