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Luke's avatar

This was a very good episode.

One thing that everyone danced around a bit but I think plays a large role here: The degree to which Twitter enables charlatans to bubble up to the top of the conversations, undermining expertise in general. This is a separate issue than the loss of respect for institutions of expertise and prestige, like WHO, CDC, or universities, but I do think the two things interact. How many times have we seen someone with an MD in their profile post some absurd, scary thing? These posts get amplified, and then over time you get the nagging feeling that MDs are a weird bunch of drama queens.

I'm being a little over-the-top. But, over the past few years, I've been sent so many twitter links by friends justifying why they haven't left the house in 5 months. And, it's always someone with an MD with a 15-tweet-long thread with really scary and, frankly, incorrect statements.

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Sharty's avatar

Very interested to listen to this--before I comprehensively swore off Twitter for my own mental health, Tom Nichols was a must-read, even though in gentler, saner times, I suspect we would rarely agree about any domestic policymaking.

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