Someone was trying to promote a Youtuber [Dr. John Campbell, RN, PhD] (https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching) as giving the expert advice on Covid. I poo-poo’d him and he took umbrance, accusing me of not even looking at his credentials:

Originally Posted by Midnight Son
He teaches Nursing in a Northern England University and is interviewed quite often on DW the German Television Network, about Covid issues.

So look before you bark please.

I told him I did look… And I had, I’d dismissed the guy months before because…well…

Seriously you actively want people to turn to YouTube for the “truth” on a subject as broad and deep as this pandemic? If I want to find out what’s the deal with Log4J or why the latest Space X blew up I totally go to YouTube and watch a synopsis. But I don’t walk away thinking I know anything more than a supposed SME can dumb down and squeeze into the 20 minute video format. And who know just how educated the presenter is or what his agenda is? All I have is a briefest whiff of the issue.

But our egos always make fools of us don’t they? There is a humorous trope in Universities that involves the undergraduate — having taken 40 hours of any given subject — spouting off like he was going to solve the world’s ill in one brilliant stroke (see Good Will Hunting for a fictionalization of this — I’ve see it in real life). Sometime they grow out of it, sometimes they don’t.

This stuff is complex. 80% of the people on these forums (and in the “real” world) just can’t/won’t wrap their head around that and so are just looking for the quick fix. They are like the supplicant going to the parish priest looking for the meaning of life…if that priest actually knew it I highly doubt he would be a lowly parish priest. Instead the priest does what he is good at and explains it some way the poor sod is capable of grasping and sends him away to contemplate his own ignorance.

But what of the other 20% (he says liberally making up statistics)? Some give facts as they see them and leave it up to us to recognize the depth of our cluelessness and some valiantly try to impart the, admittedly greater, knowledge they hold—of course they too often express that understanding as “fact” thus adding to the level of general misinformation. But a few accurate units of knowledge doesn’t mean they—or any youtube/twitter/self-proclaimed virologist/generic expert — can correctly interpret what’s going on out there any more than the parish priest. It’s complex. Thousands and thousands of scientists from many, many disciplines complex.

I’ve got 6 years of studying renaissance drama under my belt, some of that at the graduate level, and I tell you it is with profound humility that I approach the topic of Shakespeare and Marlowe. The depths of what I don’t know astound me and just catching up on the scholarship I have missed over the last 20 years would probably break me.

Dr. Campbell is not a virologist. He is not a sociologist. He is not an expert in international relations, internal medicine, supply-chain management, economics, city management or even bio-chemistry. He doesn’t know how to make a vaccine, distribute it, budget it, or figure out how to get a scared and/or ignorant population to take it. He doesn’t know the social and psychological factors that differentiate Canada from the US, or Britain from Australia and the unique political systems that each follows, and he sure as h*ll doesn’t know what backwoods Africa or India is making of all this.

What he is, is a teacher. So he is trying. Unfortunately — unlike the ill-educated high school English teacher I had that harmlessly tried to convince us that Shakespeare thought all nuns were whores — he has a world wide audience and is frankly, to me, so far from harmless as to be an active danger to the public weal.

So ya. I do comprehend…at least that little bit. The rest I am, like the rest of us, desperately struggling with. Rant over.