"Had
Covid been worse, you know, just enough worse to really get our
attention, to really be undeniable, we would have had a different
political conversation around it."
If enormous numbers of
children had died — "if kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands
from Covid" — and if the vaccines had been extraordinarily effective,
then anti-vaxxer sentiment wouldn't have been tolerated, and critics of
the vaccines would not now be viewed as people who got the question
right, and people like Sam Harris who were vicious critics of vaccine
skeptics in 2021 and beyond would be vindicated and celebrated.
If all of reality had been completely different, Sam Harris would not have been wrong, so Sam Harris is therefore not wrong.
We've
reached the leading edge of the inflection point, and people who've
been aggressively wrong for two-plus years are trying to create the
magical scenario in which being wrong wasn't being wrong. The sins
Harris assigns to Weinstein and Heying here aren't about factual
correctness, but are rather about ritual performance: They failed to
recite the catechism at the moment when the righteous faithful were
deeply committed to recitation. They betrayed a priesthood by the social
aggression of bad timing. They were 'right wrong' — they delivered
factual correctness by an improper mechanism and at the wrong stage of
the ritual cycle...<<<Read More>>>...