I read the 450+ comments on the article. Amazing mixture of misinformed, unkind, close-minded, incurious, judgemental, arrogant and ignorant.
I particularly marvelled at the comment where a guy was complaining that the article didn’t explain this fact or that fact, didn’t cite proof and so on, therefore he’ll pass on rapa, not interested.
Unless the article gives him all the information and voluminous evidence to his satisfaction, he will pass - in other words the burden of convincing him to extend his very own health/life is on some random journalist and a short throwaway article in a newspaper.
He didn’t take the article as a starting point to do his own deep dive into a presumably vitally important topic that might affect his very life and health. His attitude wasn’t “well, rapa might be valuable or it might not, let’s see what I can learn”. It wasn’t “gee, thanks for alerting me to this interesting thing that has the potential to be incredibly important for my life, it’s a starting point, now time to roll up my sleeves and educate myself!”.
To riff off of a boringly persistent complaint in those comments : it sounds like people don’t want to do the basic and hard work of studying the issue, they’d just rather a newspaper article tell them everything in one easily popped knowledge pill, even as “everyone knows there are no shortcuts”.
Do no research to inform yourself, instead throw out shopworn cliches, folksy bon mots, “clever” put downs, and vent your ignorance to general applause and groupthink.
What happened to independent thinking, inellectual curiosity, the American can do spirit and thinking before speaking?
