Curiosidade do dia

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"All of that delusional. There is not room here to fight the Covid wars all over again. There are many of you who believe that the lockdowns were absolutely necessary and we should have had more of them, instituted earlier. There are probably even seven or eight of you who think that masks work. It seems to me a kind of psychosis, this overwhelming fear of other people. But, whatever, you cleave to your beliefs and I will cleave to mine - unless other evidence turns up.

And that's the point. Because what we also sacrificed during Covid was an appetite for the truth. Those who challenged the official edicts were censored, harried and pilloried, caveated by the BBC if they were allowed on air at all, signposted as disseminators of that quixotic thing "fake news" if they were on social media. And this happened long after their points of contention were proven to contain a certain truth, whether it be about masks, social distancing, lockdowns or indeedand here I worry that we may have a scandal brewing for the future - the dangers of vaccines.

There will be another, similar scare one day not too far distant. My only request is that we keep our critical faculties about us and do not treat as pariahs, to be disparaged, those who beg to differ from the approved paradigm. We should remember that the greater the consensus, the more doubting we should be."

Trecho retirado de "Next time perhaps we shouldn't shout down the pandemic pariahs" 

"Uma reposta a esta questão foi dada por Carl Sagan, na sua última entrevista pública em 1986 (que vale a pena rever, e é fácil de encontrar no YouTube). A resposta de Sagan é: o combate à disseminação de informação tóxica faz-se com "ciência".

Efetivamente, a ciência, ao contrário, do que muitas vezes pensamos, não designa apenas um corpo de conhecimentos. Designa, sobretudo, um método, que poderia ser descrito, numa palavra, por "ceticismo". Isto porque o método científico consiste em questionar sempre tudo aquilo que nos dizem. E, se aquilo que nos dizem não pode ser provado pelos próprios e por outros, de forma independente, então, por definição, é falso.

O método científico, ou exercício permanente de uma atitude cética, é aquilo que imuniza nosso software humano da disseminação e propagação de boatos tóxicos e perigosos, que nos prejudicam enquanto comunidade humana. E é por isso que, neste tempo de redes sociais digitais, algoritmos, plataformas e inteligência artificial globalizada, é tão importante apostar numa sólida formação científica para todos. E numa atitude cética."

Trecho retirado de "Caça às bruxas, Internet e ciência: revisitar Carl Sagan" no jornal Público do passado dia 16 de Março.

"Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.

...

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory's research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax."

Trechos retirados de "Why haven't we learned our lesson?" publicado no NYT do passado dia 17 de Março.

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