> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.
Uh, not to be petty, but the growth was not exponential — neither in retrospect, nor given what was knowable at any point in time. About the most aggressive, correct thing you could’ve said at the time was “sigmoid growth”, but even that was basically wrong.
If that’s your example, it’s inadvertently an argument for the other side of the debate: people say lots of silly, unfounded things at Peak Hype that sound superficially correct and/or “smart”, but fail to survive a round of critical reasoning. I have no doubt we’ll look back on this period of time and find something similar.
Uh, not to be petty, but the growth was not exponential — neither in retrospect, nor given what was knowable at any point in time. About the most aggressive, correct thing you could’ve said at the time was “sigmoid growth”, but even that was basically wrong.
If that’s your example, it’s inadvertently an argument for the other side of the debate: people say lots of silly, unfounded things at Peak Hype that sound superficially correct and/or “smart”, but fail to survive a round of critical reasoning. I have no doubt we’ll look back on this period of time and find something similar.