Comment by kstrauser
Ben Carson was a respected neurosurgeon before he publicly stated that, quote, "Joseph built the pyramids to store grain."
You can be brilliant in one field and an idiot in everything else.
Ben Carson was a respected neurosurgeon before he publicly stated that, quote, "Joseph built the pyramids to store grain."
You can be brilliant in one field and an idiot in everything else.
Speaking without knowing something also doesn't make you an idiot. (If that was the rule the entire planet is nothing but idiots.)
The general issue is that people don't realize when they don't know something correctly, and it's impossible to vet every single thing you hear.
You can call him an idiot if he was corrected, and despite evidence he refuses to change his position. Has he done that?
I was talking about Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong not Dr. Ben Carson. Care to show any evidence that Soon-Shiong is an idiot?
Just because one doctor is stupid doesn't invalidate all doctors, does it? In that case, Dr. Ben Carson would be proof that Dr. Fauci is also an idiot.
Of course not, but it highlights the risk of Appeal to Authority: one's expertise in a specific field does not make them experts in others, even ones adjacent to their own. For a more local example, I have a lot of experience writing Python. Someone outside the field might mistakenly think my opinions on, say, Java, are equally informed. They're not.
Dr. Soon-Shiong was responsible for developing oncology drugs. Does that give him enough authority for him to evaluate RFK Jr's stance on drug safety?
You haven't researched him at all, have you?
Of course not. That would make him an expert on developing oncology drugs, not on the ethics of drug safety and especially not on communicable disease control.
If chemotherapy meds had the incredibly low adverse reaction rates of common vaccines with the same typically high effectiveness, I bet his general opinions on the subject would be different. No, of course we shouldn't require school children to get preventative chemotherapy because the risk-reward ratio would be awful. And of course we should vaccinate them against polio because there's trivial risk in the prevention compared to the life-altering effects of the illness.
Also an expert on drug safety and how to get drugs approved because he would need to go through the FDA to get it approved for chemotherapy.
That doesn't make him an idiot, it just means he watched some TV.
A lot of people think the Jews in Egypt built the pyramids, but they didn't.
This doesn't make them idiots.
(For anyone who doesn't know, the pyramids were there before Josef arrived.)
People aren't required to know everything, and when they don't that doesn't make them idiots.