Signed,
Epstein’s Mother
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Law professors seem especially vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially when it comes to shoring up some really nutty beliefs. I’ve always thought it’s because they exist in a world where everything is open to interpretation, and rhetorical wizardry trumps facts.
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With a name like Epstein, these ideas don’t hang so well.
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I once heard an evolutionary biologist giving a talk, and he joked that “evolutionary biology is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, because of the tendency of non-scientists to misinterpret principles and go off on unsupported tangents.
Some viruses do tend to weaken over time, often years to centuries, as an inherently lethal virus that rapidly kills everyone runs out of hosts. But, Coronavirus sickens many, but only kills 1-3 percent or so, leaving 97-99% to spread the virus, so no reason to see that evolutionary pressure, and certainly not so that the Dow Jones conveniently rebounds in weeks to months.
HIV can infect a community, and survive in it for years before everyone in it starts dying, so it doesn’t easily run out of hosts either.
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Somehow he thinks that “peer review” entails the use of a casting couch…
(Ugh, that is utterly repulsive on its face.)
“Do you have any peers at the FDA or CDC that agree with your views?” should elicit a better response.
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I mean, it’s an incredibly common Jewish last name. I get the association and I know you didn’t mean it antisemitically, but I’d be cautious of saying something like that.
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I know, I just mean that the people with that surname who have been making headlines lately haven’t been the best representatives of the Epstein community.
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Sounds just like his, uh–friend John Baron!
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So, as of today (ETA: March 30, 2020), America has had 2,810 known deaths from the Corona virus, and undoubtedly many more deaths that occurred before people could be tested for the virus.
That is over five times as many as he was expecting for the entire viral run.
Has he been sacked from anywhere that he has ever been employed and removed from the halls of Academia yet for his disastrous and frankly idiotic stance?
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The very first lines make it clear that he knows that he’s a “crackpot” intellectually.
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Oh, so the “keep the businesses open” advice is coming from a fellow at an institution named for “keep the banks open” President Hoover, who greased the skids to bank failures and deep economic depression? That’s some pedigree!
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His defense in the article was basically, “Look, I’m not saying my initial numbers were correct. I’m just saying everyone else’s predictions were wrong.”
[NARRATOR: They weren’t.]
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He has a membership in lots of AynCap think-tanks and institutes.
- American Enterprise Institute
- Cato Institute
- Federalist Society
- Heartland Institute
- Hoover Institution
- Manhattan Institute
- probably more
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I have no experience in epidemiology at all, but for anyone with even the faintest understanding of statistics, downloading any of the many available datasets, putting the Y axis on a log scale, and doing a linear regression to get a first-order projection of the immediate future is the work of a few minutes. This guy fails to meet even that very low bar for the ability to make quantitative estimates.
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It’s always so weird when these professionals wade into these professions of which they are not professional.
Gee, I'm a [law professor, chemical engineer, meterologist, Bible scholar, FILL-IN]. **I** can do the work of an [epidemiologist, climatologist, evolutionary biologist, FILL-IN].
If you read the whole article, Epstein has fixated on the unfounded speculation that there is a “weak-form” and a “strong-form” of the virus. When he is battered over and over by his interviewer and forced to admit it’s just a “theory” (misuse of that word, but nevermind), we are treated to the resultant sputtering apoplectic outburst at the interviewer.
In his speculation, the “strong-form”, sure, causes a lot of initial cases (and deaths), but those unfortunates all die off and the “strong-form” cannot be passed on. Because of “evolution”, the “weak-form” survives and thrives over the “strong-form”, resulting in a lot of cases, but a lot of non-lethal cases with low or no symptoms. Yada, yada, yada: he’s full of shit.
Juan Epstein is demonstrably more qualified than Richard Epstein.
[Humor Credit: @NoThisIsPatrick]
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Yep. And if the majority of those killed are outside of reproductive age - there’s no evolutionary pressure at all.
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If he’s willing to accept that an epidemiologist is qualified to represent clients in court and be law professors.
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I think he means that the there is evolutionary pressure on the virus to become less severe, not evolutionary pressure on the human hosts to become less vulnerable to it. But people who are actually familiar with the subject matter say that’s basically nonsense too.
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I don’t give him the benefit of the doubt.
Isaac, let me just explain it. This tendency takes time. It could be a week. It could be a month. It could be longer. But, in the end, you should expect something of this particular sort to take place. More importantly, on the other side, where there’s no dispute, it’s clear that people will start to evolve away from these things so that the rate of transmission will start to go down.
That seems worse than Lysenkoism.
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