Yes, we can really know things (duh!)
Post #1301
During the COVID fiasco, the so-called experts often chose to ‘argue from ignorance’ or to ‘argue from omniscience’ — but both of these are fallacies. To argue from ignorance is to “play dumb” and to say that it cannot be known beforehand whether something is right or good — so that you have to try out what they are proposing.
And to ‘argue from omniscience’ is to claim a certainty when it is unfounded. The prime example is the claim that experimental COVID shots were “safe and effective” — a claim based on a short phase 3 clinical trial which was unblinded early, before the required time had elapsed for a more proper safety analysis.
Going back to arguing from ignorance, early treatment for COVID was verbally dismissed with blunt (and false) statements like “We don’t know of anything that works.” Even COVID dissidents sometimes employ an argument from ignorance when they claim things like “We can’t know if viruses exist.”
But humans really can come to know about reality, we can develop standards and guidelines which really do work in the world. Here are some examples:
For a stable riser, bury 1’ for each 7’
When utility poles are put into the ground, it would be hazardous if they are not buried deep enough, because then they would fall over and cause power outages or even traffic accidents. But in 99% of the soil types you find, you “cannot go wrong” if you bury a foot of the pole for every 7 feet of the pole (49’ pole buried to 7’ depth):
NOTE: For shorter poles, this 1:6 ratio of proportionality (above ground = 6x below ground), breaks down, and a guideline might be “10% + 2” — where you first find 10% of the pole height, and then add 2’ on top of that to find out how much to bury.
For sterile (bacteria-free) food when canning, heat to 250 degrees F for at least 20-100 minutes
When food is low-acid — like meats, milk, and veggies — then, by the time you’ve brought that food to 250 degrees for 100 minutes, then you have sterilized it.
In order to fly through the air, use the lift equation
If you want to build an airplane that works (truly flies), then you can use the lift equation to make it work:
The lift (L) equals the product of 3 things: Coefficient of lift for your particular airfoil, kinetic energy of air flow around the wing, and the area of the wing (S):
While not generally recommended, you can “know beforehand” whether your airplane will fly — so that you don’t need to perform aerodynamic testing before taking it up for a spin. The reason that you can know it will fly before you try to fly it, is because the aerodynamics has been worked out. In other words, we can really know things.
Early on in COVID, we knew it wasn’t very deadly (Diamond Princess data, Gangelt, Germany data, Santa Clara County, California data) and we also knew how to treat it. But the experts denied both of these, opting instead to play on our fears by telling us we do not know how deadly it is and we do not know how to do early treatment.
Against the established history of epidemiology, the experts tried to argue “but this time, it is different” — and many people fell for this deception. In lieu of upcoming “pandemics” that they are warning us about, let’s hold firm to the tenet: Never again!