Without evidence of benefit, an intervention should not be presumed to be beneficial or safe.

- Rogue Medic

What Can We Expect in the Upcoming Year?

Over the last several years, it has been more common to make excuses for ignoring high-quality evidence, while celebrating the low-quality evidence as if low-quality were desirable, because the evidence that reinforced prejudices was low-quality. We had to either admit that we were wrong or behave irrationally.

For many, the choice to abandon quality and reason was easy. The reward was immediate and was reinforced by people who were selling us those bad ideas. What could possible go wrong?

The answer to that question may be painful for some of the people selling immediate gratification.

Who would have thought that a corrupt dictator would be surrounded by similarly corrupt people, who are supported by other similarly corrupt people? That’s never happened before. When attempts to isolate a country for invasion fail and the military has to fight people defending their homes, that your dream army’s erosion by corruption becomes inescapable. Reality is looking as if it will provide abundant evidence of the effects of corruption to a lot of people who have been benefiting from corruption.

A lot of people have died and more will die before that happens, so that’s not really a Happy New Year, but it should reinforce that reality doesn’t care what we believe. It is a better new year.

Some people seem to never learn, no matter the amount and/or quality of the evidence.

The extreme rejection of evidence and rejection of rationality result in a former comedian (Volodymyr Zelenskyy) to exposing the corruption of a dictator (Putin), who has surrendered a lot of his country’s ability to corrupt influence other countries.

Putin’s actions are not funny. The actions of the science deniers (not ironically, often promoted by the Kremlin) are also not funny. Reasoning with the killers has not worked, but mocking them may help to encourage people to be more reasonable.

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