From SeanII on the author of Against Democracy discovering what its like to have facts on your side but find the consensus of experts shuts you down (itself a fun bit):
If not for bad optics, libertarians would have no optics. But I meant in fact, objectively. The last decade has shown that libertarians are most likely just wrong about a lot of things.
Open borders is maybe the perfect example. The logic is impeccable. It follows perfectly from our premises. Yet if you do it, you end up with less liberty (and less of certain other things that libertarians like to pretend they don't care about).
I've never figured out what, but I'm sure it says something very interesting that about a quarter of "libertarians" don't seem to be bothered by the "less liberty" spoiler at the end of this story. That's weird. If there was a gardening club where the top horticulture experts worked it out that not gardening was the only way to garden, I'm pretty sure everyone would leave.
Bonus Jason Brennan "oh wait the experts are full of shit" coverage:
1. “Epidemiology is a science and you aren’t trained in it.”
Problem: There are basic methods with statistics that are invariant across all disciplines that use them. For instance, you must avoid selection bias. They are violating these basic methods.
2. “You can’t criticize their model unless you have a better one”
This criticism confuses the critique of their model with the critique of their data. Yes, I think the models we are seeing are poor, because they don’t handle endogeneity or variance well. But my main criticism is that they are using the wrong data collected the wrong way. Good model + bad data = bad science.
Bonus BleedingHeartLibertarians comment of value:Thomas L. Knapp:
There's no way that the matter could be, let alone should be, "governed exclusively by science."
Even if there was just one issue involved (and there are actually many), science is a method of identifying "is," not a method of determining "ought."
It's even more basic than that.
The job of science is to figure out what the disease does, how the spread occurs, etc.
WHETHER to slow the spread is also a question that belongs to politics, economics, ethics, etc., not to science.
Some political authorities have chose to try to slow the spread ("flatten the curve") to reduce fatalities by reducing the strain on medical facilities at any given time.
Other political authorities have chosen to try to achieve "herd immunity" and get it over as quickly as possible, possibly with higher fatality rates early on, by letting the thing spread as quickly as it happens to spread.
