> It's more accurate to say that his ideas were dangerous and fringe and unsupported by the science. And while he was derelict in the science, he was very active promoting his opposition to lock downs to the White House and to conservative media.
I may have misunderstood your tone, but it sounds like you think it's a good reason to have a bad opinion of him as a person or a scientist, or even prevent his ideas from being heard? I wouldn't want to live in a society like that.
One of the main things that fuelled conspiracy theories the most were draconian measures against dissenting opinions which were perpetrated by social media platforms. Silencing wrong ideas by force damages trust in science much more than engaging with them, and gives these ideas much more credibility.
I'm generally radically non-judgmental toward people and a little harder than most on problems.
I don't have a bad opinion of him as a person, although I think he acted dangerously and in a politically motivated way. I think lots of folks were freaking out at the time and their reactions are understandable. I don't expect anyone to be super human. But lots of people were also advocating policies that would (and in some cases did) result in mass death. And I do expect professionals to check themselves and try to prove themselves wrong before they embark on a political mission like he did.
I don't have particularly bad opinion of him as a scientist either. I've known several big name scientist types and usually they're very bright but only really reliable in their established field. You sometimes get to be a big scientist by taking a large contrarian bet, and I would guess he has a natural contrarian streak that served him well in some of his research. The problem with being a contrarian is that you're reactive. Your gradient isn't toward truth it's away from what you perceive as the current central tendency. So you more often end up more wrong than everyone else.
While I don't have a bad opinion of him as a scientist, I do think this episode will make me read his papers much more carefully for conclusions he's reached by contrarian intuition rather than careful reasoning. And it does to me call into question whether his motivation was to find truth or rather to offer a Marx-style criticism of everything to show how much better he is. I don't think the criticize-everything approach has proven productive in the long run.
> One of the main things that fuelled conspiracy theories the most were draconian measures against dissenting opinions which were perpetrated by social media platforms.
I wasn't on social media, so I can't say. It does suck to have your opinion dunked on. On the other hand, social media was full of inorganic influence campaigns. I don't have all the solutions, but I think it's reasonable to have some counterpressure to misinformation.
> Silencing wrong ideas by force damages trust in science much more than engaging with them, and gives these ideas much more credibility.
I'm not sure about this. The campaigns to damage trust in science were quite pervasive and organized. I'd think they wouldn't have spent all that money if the public policies did it just as well without spending on the influence campaigns.
The ideal would be if everyone were educated enough to consume the science directly. But for various reasons mass education is considered political so there's a political divide over who has the foundations to understand it.
I may have misunderstood your tone, but it sounds like you think it's a good reason to have a bad opinion of him as a person or a scientist, or even prevent his ideas from being heard? I wouldn't want to live in a society like that.
One of the main things that fuelled conspiracy theories the most were draconian measures against dissenting opinions which were perpetrated by social media platforms. Silencing wrong ideas by force damages trust in science much more than engaging with them, and gives these ideas much more credibility.