Day: 21 January 2021

by Nigel Alphonso On January 16th, an article appeared in the online magazine Quillette by Christopher Snowdon from the IEA, a right of centre think tank. The article purported to demolish the claims of a particular variant of ‘lockdown sceptics’ and as a result has garnered widespread praise including from Toby Young who tweeted that it was a thoughtful piece which sceptics needed to address. I respectfully disagree. The article was disingenuous – not in respect of what it said but in respect of its omissions and its failure to frame the argument within a judicious lockdown/anti-lockdown framework. This is not intended as an attack on Mr Snowdon per se but the criticism I make touches on the wider failure of the libertarian, left of centre and conservative movements to counter the lockdown arguments and the failure of the lockdown sceptics' movement to achieve any penetration with the wider public. This essay is not primarily about the merits of lockdown or the technicalities of the data but about the intellectual honesty of some of the main protagonists on both sides of the argument. First to the article itself entitled “Rise of the Coronavirus Cranks.” Mr Snowdon is at liberty to write whichever article he chooses. However, his article might more appropriately have been entitled “My problem with Ivor Cummins and ...

Governments should never be in thrall to scientists by Sean Walsh The philosopher of science (and incorrigible mischief maker) Paul Feyerabend once wrote this: Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook.Against Method Feyerabend claims in that book that the separation of science and state is at least as important as that of Church and state. The problem with SAGE, he’d argue, is not that it is composed of rubbish scientists (although he’d certainly have thought that), but that it exists at all. When you throw epidemiologists, computer modellers, behavioural ‘nudge’ scientists, immunologists, sociologists and (for all I know) tarot card readers into a Government briefing room and instruct them to find a consensus then you are making the mistake of believing that ‘consensus’ is the friend of knowledge, when in fact it is usually an enemy. Those who would advocate the inclusion of, for example, Sunetra Gupta onto this group miss this point: her best work will be done outside the Lockdown Establishment. Were Professor Gupta to be invited to ...

Today’s update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes WHO's revised guidance on PCR tests (vindication for sceptics!), an essay by a philosophy lecturer on why she's given up on Covid-compliant universities and 10 problems with the Google-funded mask study.

by Sinéad Murphy Giorgio Agamben Universities have been dying for some time. As their prospectuses have grown glossier, their gateway buildings more spectacular and their accommodation for students more stunningly luxurious, the Humanities subjects have been gradually hollowed out. Academics’ intellectual work has been streamlined by the auditing procedures of the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ and by growing pressure to bid for outside funding, which is distributed to projects that address a narrow range of approved themes – Sustainability, Ageing, Energy, Inequality… Student achievement has been dumbed down by the inculcation of a thoughtless relativism – Everybody’s different; That’s just my interpretation – and by the annual inflation of grades. The curriculum has begun to be tamed by continual revision – never broad enough, never representative enough – and by the drive for ‘equality and diversity’. And teaching has been marginalized by the heavy requirements that it represent itself on ever proliferating platforms and review itself in endless feedback loops. Universities, in short, have been gradually transforming into what they proudly trumpet as a Safe Space, a space that has been cleared at greatest expense to Humanities subjects, a space in which the slightest risk – that a thought might lead nowhere, that a student might be uninterested, that an idea might offend or that a teacher might really persuade – ...