... which is why the Times, like other major newsrooms, should tell their employees to get off Twitter entirely:

https://t.co/JpQvjBN0Mz

(Yes, I am tweeting this. Enjoy the delicious irony. No, really, sit with it for a moment. Roll around, until your skin tingles from its mildly caustic properties.)
(I am now on a Twitter campaign to get major institutions, including my employer, to tell employees to get off Twitter. I don't expect it to work. But a girl's gotta try.)
(Given that I am a right-wing columnist, in an overwhelmingly left-wing industry, people are bound to be suspicious of my motives. *Mutter/cough/something something et tu cancel culture?* Understandable. However ...)
Ironically, my conclusion was not inspired by conservatives complaining about "cancel culture". It was inspired by conservative editors and other institutional leaders of my acquaintance complaining about the corrosive effect Twitter was having on their institutions.
Professional institutions are delicate creatures. They function because they have a common ethos, hell a telos, towards which everyone is working, and everyone's professional energies are ultimately channeled towards that joint product.
That's true even if you don't have an explicit ideological project; you still have a common "corporate culture", which matters A LOT.
Obviously that's an ideal--there are always principal-agent problems in any employment relationship, people trying to aggrandize themselves at the expense of the whole, or push their pet projects even if fulfilling them would be a disaster for the institution ...
But Twitter reportedly made this much worse. People started treating their workplaces like hotels where they parked while they engaged in their personal brand-building exercise on Twitter.
Any attempt to refocus employees on the needs of the institution bogged down in endless adjudications of superficially similar behaviors that were treated differently ... "Why does Mommy love Joey more than me?"
And I guess this is where I am fundamentally conservative: I think institutions matter a lot. I think virtually every staffer at a major newsroom or thinktank or other professional group is getting more out of their group than the group is getting out of them.
The sum is greater than the parts. It is a mistake to let that sum disaggregate into a dozen or a hundred or a thousand parts, which is what Twitter tends to do.

I don't want the government to ban it, to be clear, and I think Twitter itself should strive for viewpoint neutrality
But I think major institutions should also strive for viewpoint neutrality by telling everyone to get off Twitter, rather than taking on the impossible job of "retroactive social media editor" where people are disciplined or fired after the fact for crossing a dim and wavy line.
Anyway, thanks for reading, as usual, this is just a little teaser for a column that makes the point in much more depth. That column is here and I urge you to read it: https://t.co/JpQvjBN0Mz

More from Society

global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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