Many years ago, there was an article in The Sunday New York Times magazine about an extraordinary young man who was described as being a genius.
As an example of his intellectual ability, at the age of seven or eight if I recall, he had been playing with numbers and discovered that if you took the square of the sum of two numbers, the result was the sum of the square of the first number plus the square of the second number plus twice the product of the two numbers. He had asked his father why this was so.
At his tender age, with no instruction in algebra, he had discovered The Binomial Theorem.
(a+b)² = a² + 2ab + b²
Being of high school age at the time of the article, there was some discussion of his possible future career in Philosophy. The big obstacle to that career path was very disturbing.
He had by then become aware of Doctors of Philosophy having just delivered their latest research papers at major symposiums attended by thousands, who having concluded their presentations, were then subjected to some anonymous voice from somewhere in the auditorium shouting out "Yeah!! Ri - i - i - i -ght." and thereby losing their credibility and having their careers torpedoed.
Deniers of COVID-19 information play on that same impulse. So do other deniers. Sound bytes play into that misconduct too.
Please don't fall prey.
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