Dr Tom Cowan | Critical Thinking

Dr Tom Cowan | Let me understand your side | Critical Thinking

If somebody says something to you that’s new, different, maybe interesting, or something that piques your interest, the thing that I would like to believe about myself is that I start questioning them, so that at the end of my time with them, I perfectly understand how they arrived at that conclusion.

I didn’t say that I agree with their conclusion, I just know that if somebody says, you know, “The moon is made out of cheese," I want to know what their evidence is that shows me that the moon is made out of cheese. Did they go and do a sample? Did they go and take x-ray crystallography? And if they did x-ray crystallography, how did they validate that that’s an acceptable way of knowing that? And I do that regularly with people—and I’ll take an hour or so (to understand).

And then what I do is I repeat back what I heard so that the person knows that I know all the steps that make you arrive at saying “the moon is made of cheese”.

And I ask the person to correct me if I got it wrong, so if I think they did an electron microscopy and they really did an X-Ray crystallography, I want them to say “No Tom, I didn’t do it that way – here’s how I did it, here’s how I validated that it works”.

At the end of that, I can now take that to people who may disagree, that ‘the moon is not made out of cheese’, and since I now know the entire argument, I can look into the research and find out more about it if I want, and then I can go to people who disagree with it and make my own decision.

Now most of the people who are on “our side” (and I’m not going to name names here) but I know them and have known some for decades, and I can tell you that in the last 2 years – not one person (besides the people in this group) has called me on the phone or has emailed me and said “Let me understand how you arrived at the conclusion that there is no SARS-Cov-2”. Not one.

Instead, what you get is a complete misunderstanding — they couldn’t recreate the argument, they don’t know what we said, they don’t know what I said, they don’t know how I arrived at the conclusion, they say things like “Well how do you explain Rabies?” “How do you explain that all the scientists in the world think differently?”

So I usually say, so the way we decide whether there’s a virus is we take a vote of the virologists? So if 98% say yes, then it is, and if 97% say it is, then it isn’t, right? I mean, not one person — they’ll say — they just haven’t taken the time. Now, I don’t know why they haven’t taken the time.

All I know is that it is a sure-fire way to learn nothing about life.

And so I encourage everybody, and I didn’t say you have to agree with me, or anybody else, or anything, or that the moon is made of cheese, but if there’s somebody you respect, you should make the effort to know why... how & why exactly... they came to that conclusion, and if you don’t do that, I think you should have nothing to say about the matter.

Source: MonkeyPox Summit Q&A
https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c/Monkeypox-Mania-Summit:2