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I’ll bring this over from Festival. It seems apropos considering Cletus’ comment. Lucius, ya olde fruit, you picked the wrong group to troll. The best part is, you’ll go away with more learning today than you had in years. You’re welcome.

MIT researchers ‘infiltrated’ a Covid skeptics community a few months ago and found that skeptics place a high premium on data analysis and empiricism.

“Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution.”

“Indeed, anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries, who espouse naïve realism about the “objective” truth of public health data.”

“In other words, anti-maskers value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research and direct reading over “expert” interpretations.”

“Its members value individual initiative and ingenuity, trusting scientific analysis only insofar as they can replicate it themselves by accessing and manipulating the data firsthand.”

“They are highly reflexive about the inherently biased nature of any analysis, and resent what they view as the arrogant self-righteousness of scientific elites.”

“Many of the users believe that the most important metrics are missing from government-released data.”

“One user wrote: ‘Coding data is a big deal—and those definitions should be offered transparently by every state. Without a national guideline—we are left with this mess’.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07993.pdf