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Michael Berkowitz's avatar

Well done. Regarding the brush-cleaning, I'll add two points:

1. Skepticism as an inclination is more important than critical-thinking skills. If one wants to believe, the tools of disbelief will simply rust; if one wants to doubt, one will develop the tools.

2. Basic number skills *are* tools that we should focus on providing. Read "Innumeracy", "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" and others -- there's a whole genre.

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Richard Weinberg's avatar

Basically you're correct, and what you say is important.

As a minor quibble, I'd say the Covid mRNA vaccines were extremely effective and produced extraordinarily quickly; that they didn't stop the pandemic is attributable to limited supplies, human cupidity, and the remarkable evolutionary adaptability of the virus. And the purported scientific certainty that Covid-19 originated in a wet market has perhaps more to do with journalistic coverage early in the pandemic than a genuine consensus among virologists.

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